Estate lots, eighty-year-old canopy and the longest cable runs anywhere we work. More photographed work here than in any other part of the service area.
Preston Hollow is the place TC Lighting has photographed most. Thirty-two projects, on properties where Todd Cormier has in several cases been back two and three times over the years, and the pattern you can see on the lawns and the paving in every one of those photographs is the same technique applied to ground that happens to suit it unusually well.
What makes the work here specific is not taste. It is distance and height. The lots run to one and two acres, the houses sit a long way back off the street, and the trees were mature before most of the houses were built. All three change the engineering before they change the design, and that is what this page is about.
This matters more than it sounds. Highland Park and University Park, a few minutes south, are separate incorporated cities with their own building departments and their own rules — which is why they get their own pages on this site. Preston Hollow is not one of those. It is a neighbourhood of Dallas, so one authority covers all of it.
The part worth understanding is that a lighting system is two different kinds of electrical work wearing one name. The fixtures and the cable between them are low voltage, twelve volts, and harmless to handle. The transformer that feeds them is not: it has to be supplied from a circuit, and that side is line voltage. In Texas that half is work for a licensed electrical contractor, and on a property this size there is rarely only one of them.
TC Lighting holds Texas Electrical Contractor licence TECL 41495 and does both halves. The job does not stop at the transformer and wait for a second trade to be booked. What the City of Dallas asks for by way of permit or inspection depends on the scope of the particular job and it changes, so we confirm it for your scope rather than quoting you a figure off a web page — including this one.
On a fifty-foot lot every fixture on the property is within thirty metres of a single transformer and the wiring barely has to be thought about. A Preston Hollow garden is a different exercise. The house sits well back, the lot runs to an acre or two, and the far corner can be three hundred feet from the nearest sensible place to put a transformer.
Low-voltage cable loses volts over distance, and a twelve-volt lamp arriving at nine volts is not a dimmer version of itself. It goes orange. Next to a lamp on a shorter run it reads as a different colour altogether, which is the single most common fault we are called out to look at on other people's systems, and it dies early as well.
So the sequence is: cable sized for the length of the run rather than for the fixture on the end of it, several transformers placed around the property instead of one large one at the house, loads balanced across the taps, and the voltage measured at the furthest lamp after dark instead of assumed from a calculation. Several of the properties photographed below have a pool house or a cabana standing well clear of the main building — effectively a second site, with its own feed and its own transformer.
Everything buried goes in conduit, whatever its voltage. That is the policy everywhere, and it earns its keep here more than anywhere: gardeners in weekly, beds edged, irrigation trenched, and a spade through unprotected cable means a fault to find along three hundred feet of run.
Look at the lawns and the paving in the photographs below. The pattern falling across them is not decoration, it is the point: light placed high in a tree and dropped down through the branches, so what lands on the ground carries the shape of the crown with it. Preston Hollow has the hosts for it. The trees here were substantial before much of the present architecture existed, and a big old crown with real interior structure is the one thing the technique cannot do without.
What that means in practice is climbing. Fixtures go twenty-five to thirty-five feet up, set by hand, with the cable run up the trunk and secured so that it will not girdle as the tree thickens — a bracket fixed hard to a living limb strangles it over a decade. Hardware has to leave the tree room to grow, and that is a choice made at installation, not a thing fixed later.
It also means coming back. A crown fills in, and the pattern set three years ago softens as it does. Re-aiming is a night job, because the dark is the only time the pattern is visible at all, and it is part of maintaining a system like this rather than a sign that something has gone wrong.
A deep setback gives you something most properties do not: an arrival. Gate, drive, motor court, front door — a sequence with four moments in it rather than a path from the pavement. Several of the properties below have iron gates, and one has a covered drive through.
The commonest mistake on this kind of frontage is lighting it the way a car park is lit. A fixture sitting at roughly eye height as you come up the drive puts glare straight into the windscreen at the exact moment the driver needs to see a gate pier, and more light makes it worse rather than better. The rule is to light the surfaces and leave the eye alone: piers grazed from below and slightly behind, the edge of the drive read from what the planting throws across it rather than from a row of path lights down both sides, and the motor court itself lit downward from the house and the canopy.
Where there is a porte-cochère there is a ceiling, and a ceiling is the easiest soft light on the whole property — bounce something off it and the car, the steps and the faces of whoever is getting out are all lit from above with nothing visible doing it. It is also the thing most often left out.
A good many Preston Hollow gardens have a pool close to the house, and several of the photographs below are of exactly that. A swimming pool after dark is a mirror, and a mirror does what you aim at it. Any fixture pointed across the water arrives in the eye of whoever is standing on the far side.
So the aim goes away from the surface. The planting behind the pool, the trunks beyond it, the coping grazed along its edge so the shape of the water reads without a single beam crossing it. The reflection then works for nothing: lit trees land in the water and the garden doubles, which is the effect people are usually asking for when they point at the pool and say they want it lit.
Wet stone and bare feet set the rest of it. Fixtures off the walking line, conduit under paving rather than through a bed that will be dug, and every junction kept clear of the splash zone.
Preston Hollow has had landscape lighting for longer than most of the Metroplex, so the job here is more often somebody else's twenty-year-old installation than a blank property. The state of those is consistent enough to predict: halogen, rusted boxes, cable gone brittle, fixtures swallowed by bed growth, a third of it dark and some of the rest aimed at nothing in particular.
That gets decided run by run rather than wholesale, because a good deal of it is usually worth keeping — sound brass, cable already in intact conduit, runs that still go where you would put them today. What is past saving comes out. Where the bones are good, converting the system from halogen to LED is a fraction of the cost of starting again and it is the largest single cut in running cost available on a property this size, because it is also the property with the most lamps on it.
The two relevant pages are repair and maintenance, which covers systems we did not install, and LED conversion and retrofit. Fourteen of the thirty-one client letters on the reviews page were written by Dallas clients, and several of them are about precisely this job.
On a small lot a lighting system can sensibly be one circuit that comes on at dusk and goes off at midnight. On a Preston Hollow property it should not be. The arrival, the garden and the terrace are used at different hours by different people, and wiring them to a single command means every compromise is made for all of them at once — usually by leaving the whole place lit until two in the morning because somebody wants the gate visible.
Control is the cheapest part of the system and the part most often left as an afterthought. What we specify, and why:
Where a house already has a system, control is often the single best-value thing that can be changed about it: the fixtures and cable may be sound and the only real fault is that two acres answer to one switch. That is usually a service visit rather than a rebuild.
Thirty-two photographed Preston Hollow projects, which is the largest set in the library for anywhere we work. Twelve of them are here and the rest are in the gallery. Every one is a TC Lighting installation, shot on the property at night — no stock imagery and no renderings. Click any of them to see it full screen.
Preston Hollow is part of Dallas rather than a city of its own, so these are Dallas letters — printed word for word as they were sent to Todd Cormier. All thirty-one are on the reviews page in full.
“Todd has a talent for outdoor lighting. He has honed his craft for many years and takes pride in creating a masterpiece of art using outdoor lighting. Look at his portfolio of work and you will see creativity and art in each project. He is honest and trustworthy…”
“We were so impressed with Todd and his crew. He was meticulous, gave us a plan and brought it to life. The pools of light and warm touches were perfect. He made our home a shining jewel. Our neighbors are jealous and will be calling Todd soon, I am sure.”
“I have used Todd Cormier and his landscape lighting companies to handle my outdoor lighting for the past 20 years. When we built our home, he put together a plan that not only provided a beautiful nighttime landscape, but also gave us a design that provided lighting to help us feel safe and more secure…”
Just north of the Park Cities, and the single best-documented part of the service area. Free on-site design visit, and Todd comes out himself.
Preston Hollow, Dallas, 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 Preston Hollow 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.
No. It is a neighbourhood of Dallas and City of Dallas rules apply across it. That is worth knowing because Highland Park and University Park, a few minutes south, genuinely are separate incorporated cities with their own building departments — University Park has its own page for that reason, and Highland Park is likewise separate.
It depends on the scope, and we will not give you a number off a web page. The low-voltage half of a system is not the same question as the line-voltage circuit feeding the transformer, which is licensed electrical work in Texas either way. We hold TECL 41495, we do both halves, and we confirm what the City of Dallas currently requires for your particular job before anything starts.
More than one, usually. It is decided by the length of the runs and the load on each, not by the size of the property on paper — the point of spreading them around the garden is to keep each run short enough that the lamp at the far end still gets its full voltage. We measure that at the furthest fixture after dark rather than trusting the arithmetic.
They are climbed and set by hand, twenty-five to thirty-five feet up. It does not harm the tree if the hardware leaves room for growth: cable secured so it cannot girdle the trunk as it thickens, and nothing clamped hard to a living limb. That is a decision made at installation, which is why a cheap mounting on a mature tree is a problem you only discover ten years later.
Almost always a mix, decided run by run. Brass fixtures and cable already in sound conduit are often fine; brittle cable and rusted boxes are not. Where the layout still makes sense, converting it from halogen to LED costs a fraction of a rebuild and cuts the running cost more here than on a small lot, simply because there are more lamps on it.
Thirty-two photographed projects, which is more than any other place we cover, and every one of them was shot after dark on the property rather than taken from a stock library. Twelve are on this page and the rest are in the gallery.
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.