How to Choose a Landscape Lighting Company in Dallas–Fort Worth

Three Quotes, Three Different Jobs

Most people buy landscape lighting once. You will probably collect two or three quotes, find that they differ by thousands, and have no reliable way to tell whether the expensive one is padded or the cheap one is missing half the work. The documents will not help: one is a single line and a number, another is a list of fixture counts, a third is a rendering of a house that is not quite yours.

The difficulty is that almost none of what decides whether a lighting system is still working in ten years is visible in a quote. Cable sizing, conduit, how the runs are routed around tree roots, whether the lamps are colour-matched, whether the person who designed it has ever seen the property after dark — none of that shows up as a line item, and all of it decides what you own.

This guide is the list of things worth asking about, in the order we would ask them. It is written by a Dallas–Fort Worth contractor, so take the obvious bias into account; the questions are still the right ones to put to anybody quoting you, including us.

The Single Biggest Tell Is How the Design Gets Made

If you only test one thing, test this.

There is a way of selling lighting that has become common and that is worth recognising. Someone comes out and surveys the property — measures, photographs, takes notes — and leaves. A few days later a proposal arrives by email with a computer-generated rendering of a house lit up at night, and a price. The rendering is persuasive and it is not a design. It is an illustration of a mood. It cannot tell you where the transformer goes, why a run takes the long way round a tree, which fixture is doing which job, or what you are going to see from the kitchen window in February when the leaves are off.

We hear regularly from homeowners who have been through that and found it confusing rather than reassuring — who could not tell from the document what they were actually buying, and could not ask the rendering a question.

The alternative is older and slower and it is what we do. Todd Cormier walks the property with you, in daylight, and draws the plan there and then while you watch. You can point at a tree and ask what he is going to do with it, and get an answer on the spot. You can say you do not want the side fence lit, and watch it come off the drawing. By the time he leaves you have seen the plan being made, which is a different kind of confidence from being shown a finished picture.

Ask any company you are considering: who designs it, do they come themselves, does the design happen on the property or at a desk afterwards, and can you see it being made? If the answer is that a salesman surveys and a designer you will never meet produces a file, you now know what you are buying.

The Parts That Decide Whether It Still Works in Ten Years

None of this appears in a rendering, and all of it decides what you own.

• Brass and copper rather than painted aluminium. A painted fixture has a finish to lose, and in North Texas sun it chalks, fades and then lifts, after which the metal underneath is on its own. Solid brass has no finish to lose — it patinas and keeps working.
• Conduit. Low-voltage cable is not required to be run in conduit, which is why most installers bury it bare. What takes a buried cable out is not age, it is an edger along a bed line, a shovel during a planting change, an aerator in autumn or a new irrigation run. We run everything in conduit, both voltages, so the protection starts the day the cable goes in.
• Cable sized for the run. Low-voltage cable loses volts over distance. A twelve-volt lamp arriving at nine volts is not a dimmer version of itself — it goes orange, reads as a different colour from its neighbours, and dies early. Ask how the cable gauge was chosen and whether the voltage is checked at the furthest fixture after dark, or just calculated.
• Colour-matched lamps. Cheap LED lamps vary between units, and the variation shows the moment three fixtures light one facade: one reads warmer than the next and the elevation looks patchy. Consistency across the system, and warm enough to flatter brick and stone, is a specification decision somebody either makes or does not.
• Transformers with room to spare. A transformer run at its limit has no capacity for the pool, the outbuilding or the extra tree you will want in three years.

More detail on how we build it is on the landscape lighting service page.

Does the Contractor Know This Ground?

The Metroplex straddles two different landscapes and the boundary runs right through the service area. It genuinely changes the work, and a contractor who cannot tell you which side of it your house sits on has probably not thought about your property specifically.

East of the divide — Dallas, the Park Cities, Plano — is Blackland Prairie: deep expansive clay that shrinks in drought and swells after rain. It moves fixtures out of aim, so systems there need re-aiming more often. The canopy is live oak, pecan and cedar elm, which is why moonlighting reads so well in Dallas and especially in Preston Hollow.

West and north — Keller, Colleyville, Southlake, Flower Mound — is Eastern Cross Timbers: sandier, better drained, less heave, so aim holds better. The trade-off is post oak, which has shallow roots spreading well beyond the canopy and almost no tolerance for trenching inside the dripline. Damage there shows up three or four years later, long after anyone would connect it to a trench.

West of the Trinity, in Fort Worth, limestone sits close to the surface and there is real elevation change.

Each town we work in has its own page on this site describing what is particular about it. That is a reasonable standard to hold any local contractor to.