A young city with a trail behind half its gardens, where the job is often to make one house stop looking like four others.
Allen had 1,940 residents in 1970 and 8,314 in 1980. Essentially everything you can see there now was built after that, which makes it one of the most consistently modern housing stocks in the Metroplex — and gives any lighting job here two characteristics you do not get in an older town.
The first is the greenbelt. Allen built its neighbourhoods around a linked trail and creek system rather than around through roads, so an unusual share of lots back onto public open space that people genuinely walk after dark. The second is repetition. When a subdivision goes up in three years, the same handful of elevations appear over and over down a street. Both of those change what good lighting looks like here, and neither is a problem exactly — they are just the conditions.
Allen's creek corridors carry a continuous trail network, and a large number of houses present their back fence to it. That is a pleasant thing to own and a specific thing to light, because the boundary is not private and it is used at night.
Two mistakes are common. The first is lighting the fence line outward, which does nothing for the garden and puts a row of glare sources at eye height for everyone on the path. The second is the opposite — treating the back boundary as a wall and leaving it black, which wastes the best feature of the lot, because a greenbelt gives you mature trees and depth that a fenced neighbour never will.
What works is to light into the boundary rather than across it. Trees on your side of the line, uplit from your side, read as a lit edge from the garden and show the walker nothing but a glow in a canopy. Where a gate opens onto the trail, that gets proper low-level path lighting for the simple reason that people use it in the dark. Keep the fixtures' brightness down and their aim steep and the path stays dark, which is what its users actually want.
Build a street in two years and you build it from a short menu. Walk an Allen cul-de-sac and the same gable, the same stone-and-brick split, the same arched entry will come round three or four times. Lighting is one of the few things that can differentiate a house on that street without touching the house, and most schemes miss the chance by defaulting to the same thing the builder's package did: a row of equally spaced uplights across the front. Four houses with identical lighting on an identical elevation look like a show home run.
The differentiation comes from deciding what your elevation's subject is and lighting only that. On one house it is a two-storey stone chimney, and the right answer is two tight beams grazing it and almost nothing else across the rest of the frontage. On the next it is a deep arched entry, which wants the recess lit so the arch reads as an opening rather than a shadow. On a third it is a single good tree in the front lawn, and the house itself should sit behind it in half-light.
That is a design decision rather than an equipment one, and it is the part of the visit Todd spends most time on. The buyer's guide goes through how to tell a designed plan from a priced fixture count when you are comparing quotes.
A practical point that comes up on nearly every Allen job, because the houses are a particular vintage. Homes built through the 1990s and 2000s here are usually all-electric with a tidy exterior and very few spare exterior circuits — often one outdoor receptacle at the back and nothing at the front at all.
A low-voltage lighting system needs one supply, and it is a modest one; the transformer does the rest. The questions worth settling at the design visit rather than on install day are where that supply comes from, where the transformer physically sits, and whether your panel has a spare way.
We have not photographed a Allen installation yet, so every photograph below is from Preston Hollow and Dallas — the nearest documented work, on the same ground and the same kind of property. Each one is captioned with the town it was actually taken in. All are TC Lighting installations, shot after dark on the property. Click any of them to see it full screen.
The full gallery is grouped by town, and the reviews page carries thirty-one client letters in full. If you are in Allen and want your property to be the first photograph on this page, the design visit is free.
No Allen client has written to us yet, so rather than dress a letter from somewhere else up as a local one, here are three from elsewhere in the service area with the towns they were written from. All thirty-one are on the reviews page in full.
“When we had the initial meeting with Todd, he showed up with plans of how all the lighting was laid out and an estimate. He addressed all our concerns and had no problem adding extra items per our request. Todd and his crew were great…”
“We worked with Todd and the TC Lighting team on a recent new build lighting project. What a great experience! Todd and his team are passionate about lighting and providing a truly unique and awe inspiring final product, and they delivered! We have already received so many positive comments from our friends and neighbors…”
“TC Lighting recently redid my front and back landscape lighting. The proposals for lighting were better than what I had in mind when I called. The outcome exceeded all expectations. I have combination of up lights, pathway lights and down lights in the overhangs…”
Collin County, between Plano and McKinney, about twenty-eight miles north-east of Carrollton. Free on-site design visit, and Todd comes out himself.
Allen, TX · inside the TC Lighting service area · free on-site design visit
Landscape lighting is the bulk of the work, but it is not all of it. Every service below is available on a Allen property, from the same crew and the same licensed Texas electrical contractor.
Design and installation — uplighting, moonlighting, path and specimen work.
Read more →Seasonal install, maintained through the season, taken down and stored.
Read more →Govee-type colour-changing track set into the eave line. Invisible by day.
Read more →Halogen to LED on an existing system, keeping the runs and fixtures worth keeping.
Read more →Car parks, drives, steps, walls and seating areas, residential and commercial.
Read more →Inside work from the same licensed electrical contractor.
Read more →Cameras and doorbells fitted and wired properly.
Read more →Diagnosing and rebuilding failing systems, including ones we did not install.
Read more →Or start here: the home page for the whole picture, about Todd Cormier for who turns up, the photo gallery for the work itself, reviews for what clients say, and contact to reach us directly.
Not if it is aimed properly. The rule is to light into your own boundary rather than across it -- trees on your side, uplit from your side -- so the garden gains a lit edge and the walker sees only a glow in a canopy. What causes complaints is fixtures aimed outward along a fence line at roughly eye height.
That is one of the few things it can do without touching the house. The way to do it is to pick the one feature your elevation really has -- a stone chimney, a deep arched entry, a good tree -- and light that properly while keeping the rest of the frontage quiet. Evenly spaced uplights across the whole front is what makes four houses look identical.
No. A low-voltage system needs one supply and the transformer feeds everything from there. What we settle at the design visit is where that supply comes from, where the transformer sits so cable runs stay short, and whether your panel has a spare way. If it does not, that is a known extra rather than a surprise on install day.
Yes. TC Lighting is a licensed Texas electrical contractor, TECL 41495, so the supply, the transformer and the lighting are all one contractor. There is no second trade to book and nobody to coordinate between.
A typical Allen lot is one to two days on site, plus a separate evening for the night-set, which is when the fixtures are actually aimed. The aiming is not optional and it is not done in daylight -- that evening is where the difference between a good scheme and an average one shows up.
Four fields, about fifteen seconds. Send the address and what you are hoping to light. Todd walks the property himself, in daylight, and you get a written plan with a fixed price and dates before any work begins.
Prefer to talk? Call (972) 345-1180.