Designed and installed by us

You are home when it is dark

Think about when you are actually at your house. Most of the year, you leave in daylight and come back to a yard you cannot see. The landscape you paid for is invisible for most of the hours you are there to enjoy it.

Lighting is the cheapest way to get more out of everything else in the yard. It roughly doubles the hours a patio is usable, it makes steps and paths safe to walk, it makes a house look considerably more expensive from the street, and it removes the dark corners that make a property feel unwatched.

We design and install low-voltage systems ourselves — the layout, the transformer, the wire, the fixtures and the controls.

Request an estimate

Front elevation of a North Texas home with landscaped frontage

What we light

Where lighting earns its keep

The house itself

Uplighting on columns, gables, stone and architectural detail. This is the one that changes how the property reads from the street, and it is usually the first thing people notice.

Trees

Uplighting from below for drama, or moonlighting — fixtures mounted up in the canopy throwing dappled light down through the branches. Moonlighting is the most natural-looking effect available and almost nobody does it.

Paths and steps

Not a runway of identical lights every six feet. Enough light, placed where the ground actually changes level, so people can see where to put their feet.

Patios and outdoor living

Low, warm, glare-free light around seating and cooking areas so the space is usable after dark without feeling like a car park.

Beds and focal points

Grazing across a wall to bring out its texture, and accents on specimen plants, water features and stonework so the landscape has depth at night rather than a black backdrop.

Entries and driveways

Making the front door obvious, the house number readable and the drive edge visible — the practical half of the job, and the half guests notice when it is missing.

Technique

Why some lighting looks expensive and some looks cheap

It is almost never the fixtures. It is where they are aimed and how many there are.

1Light the object, not the fixture

You should see a lit tree, not a bright light with a tree behind it. Fixtures get tucked into beds, shielded and aimed so the source itself is out of view from where people stand and sit.

2Fewer fixtures, better placed

The commonest mistake in residential lighting is too many path lights spaced evenly down a walk. It reads as an airport runway. Light the changes — a curve, a step, a corner — and let the rest fall away.

3Keep the colour temperature consistent

Warm white throughout, around 2700K, looks like lamplight. Mixing warm and cool fixtures across a front elevation is the single most obvious sign of a system that grew by accident.

4No glare into eyes or windows

Aim away from the front door approach, away from seating sightlines, and away from bedroom windows. A fixture that makes you squint has failed no matter what it is illuminating.

5Layer it

A little light on the house, a little in the trees, a little at ground level. Depth comes from several modest layers, not from one bright wash.

6Leave room to grow

Plants get bigger. Fixtures get set back far enough and on enough wire that a shrub filling in does not bury the light two years later.

How it is built

The parts that decide whether it still works in five years

Low voltage, 12V. Safe to work around, safe near planting beds, and far easier to extend or adjust later than a line-voltage system.
A transformer sized with headroom. Loading a transformer to its limit leaves no room to add a fixture later and shortens its life. We size for what you might add, not just what goes in on day one.
Wire gauge matched to the run. Voltage drops over distance. Fixtures at the far end of an undersized run go dim and yellow while the near ones look fine — the classic symptom of a system wired by guesswork.
Waterproof connections. Buried splices are where cheap systems die. Done properly they are sealed and stay sealed; done badly they corrode through one wet winter.
LED fixtures. A fraction of the power draw, far longer life and no seasonal bulb-replacement ritual. It also means more fixtures on one transformer.
Controls that suit you. Timer, photocell, or app control with schedules. Astronomic timers that follow sunset through the year are worth the small extra.

A note on placement.

Fixtures and wire get set back from mowing and edging lines. The most common cause of a dead light on a maintained property is a mower or a trimmer, not the fixture.

Want to see the house at night?

Tell us what you would like lit and we will design a layout and price it.

Get an Estimate Call (972) 240-8082

FAQs

Lighting questions

Do I have to light the whole property at once?

No, and most people should not. A front elevation and a couple of trees transforms the kerb appeal for a fraction of a whole-property system. We design the full layout and size the transformer for it, then install in stages if you would rather.

Will it run up the electricity bill?

LED landscape lighting draws very little — a whole residential system is typically comparable to a couple of household bulbs. Running it on a timer or an astronomic control rather than dusk-to-dawn trims it further.

What about the wiring across the lawn?

Low-voltage cable is buried shallow, routed through beds where possible and kept clear of the lines a mower and edger follow. Where it has to cross turf, it goes deep enough to be out of the way of aeration and normal maintenance.

Can lighting be added to an existing irrigation system trench work?

If we are already opening ground for irrigation or drainage, running lighting cable at the same time saves labour and disruption. If you are considering both, doing them together is genuinely cheaper than doing them a year apart.

Someone else installed our lighting and half of it has stopped working. Can you look at it?

Tell us what it is doing and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth repairing or whether you are better off replacing it. Dim yellow fixtures at the end of a run usually mean undersized wire, which is a design problem rather than a fixture problem, and that changes the answer.

What is moonlighting?

Fixtures mounted high in a tree, aimed down, so light filters through the branches and casts leaf shadows on the ground. It looks like a full moon through the canopy. It is the most natural effect in landscape lighting and it is remarkably rare in this market.

Let’s talk

Get an estimate

Tell us about the property and what you would like lit — the house, the trees, a patio, or all of it.

Prefer to talk? Call (972) 240-8082, Monday to Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

Landscape Lighting