Landscape Lighting in Dallas, TX — Neighbourhood by Neighbourhood

Dallas Is Half a Dozen Different Lighting Problems

• Preston Hollow. One and two-acre lots, circular drives, and the best moonlighting hosts in the city — live oaks that were mature when the houses were new. The work here is mostly up in the trees: fixtures mounted high, aimed down through the crown, with the drive and the motor court taking the shadow. Long runs from the house to the back of the lot are the engineering problem.
• Bluffview. Creek lots and real elevation change, which is unusual in Dallas. Retaining walls, stepped terraces and sloped lawns give you something to graze, and the change in level means a fixture that is invisible from the house can be pointed straight at a neighbour's bedroom from below. Aiming matters more here than anywhere else in the city.
• Lakewood and the M Streets. Nineteen-twenties and thirties Tudors and Craftsman cottages on narrow lots with alley access and enormous pecans overhead. Small frontages mean low lumen levels and tight beam control; the canopy is the feature and the house is the backdrop, which is the reverse of how most people assume it works.
• Devonshire, Greenway Parks and the old planned blocks. Laid out in the twenties and thirties with parkway trees and deep front lawns. The parkway canopy is usually the town's, not yours, which shapes what can be mounted where.
• The estate streets off Walnut Hill and Northwest Highway. Newer large builds where the architecture is the subject: limestone, stucco and glass that take a wash rather than a graze.

Two of the enclaves inside Dallas have their own pages, because they are their own cities with their own rules: Highland Park and University Park. Preston Hollow has one too, because there is enough work there to fill it.

The Trees Dallas Gives You Are Built for Moonlighting

This is the good news, and it is the reason the technique TC Lighting is known for works so well in this city. The Blackland canopy is live oak, pecan, cedar elm, bur oak and red oak, and on the older streets a great many of them were planted sixty to ninety years ago. They have dense, layered crowns with real interior structure — which is exactly what you need to throw a shadow.

Moonlighting means putting fixtures high in a mature tree and aiming down through the branches, so the light landing on the lawn carries the pattern of the canopy with it. It reads as moonlight rather than as a lit garden. A live oak forty feet across does it beautifully. A young ornamental planted five years ago cannot do it at all, which is why the same plan does not transfer from an old street to a new one.

A working order for a Dallas property with mature trees:

1. Downlights first, high in the two or three best trees. This is the layer that makes the property read at night, and it is the layer most installers skip because it means getting up there.
2. Then the architecture — a wash on brick or limestone, a graze on anything with texture worth showing.
3. Then specimen uplighting on trunks and forms that deserve it, at a lower level than people expect.
4. Path and step lighting last, and only where somebody actually walks. Path lights are a safety device, not a runway.

What Coming Back to the Same Dallas Houses for Twenty Years Teaches You

The thing that shows up most often in the letters clients have written is not a technique. It is duration. Several of the people whose testimonials are on this site have used Todd at two or three different houses across twenty years, and a good share of those moves happened inside Dallas — Preston Hollow to Bluffview, an older house to a new build a few streets over.

That changes how you design, and it is worth saying plainly because it is not how most of this trade works:

• Nothing is specified to survive the warranty and no longer. If you are going to see the same client in eight years at a different address, a system that looks tired at year five is a conversation you have to have.
• Serviceability beats cleverness. Fixtures that can be reached, lamps that can be changed, a transformer with room left in it. A system nobody can service is a system that gets ripped out rather than repaired.
• The system is expected to be added to. Dallas properties get pools, outbuildings, replanted beds and new terraces. Capacity and spare runs get built in, because the alternative is trenching the garden twice.

It is also why a good share of our repair work is on other people's installations. When a system fails in its first decade there is usually a reason in how it was built, and after enough of them the list of reasons gets short and familiar — bare cable, undersized runs, a transformer at its limit, fixtures nobody can get to.