Sun, caliche and a protected night sky change what is worth building. Todd Cormier designs every project himself — and drives out to do it.
TC Lighting is a Dallas–Fort Worth company. Scottsdale is the one place outside Texas we keep going back to, because clients there keep asking us to — and because the desert is genuinely interesting to light.
When we come, we come properly: our own van, our own crew, our own materials. Todd Cormier walks the property in daylight and designs it there, the same as he would in Preston Hollow, and he is on site while it is being built. The difference is the schedule. An Arizona project is planned as one continuous block rather than spread across a few weeks, so the earlier you tell us about a date you are working towards, the easier it is to hold it.
What follows is not a Texas page with the city name swapped out. The sun, the ground and the sky here all behave differently, and they change what is worth building.
Scottsdale gets on the order of three hundred sunny days a year, and from May through September the UV index sits at eleven or above — the top of the scale, the band where the forecast stops giving you a number and just says extreme. A landscape lighting system lives outdoors in that for its entire life. It is the single biggest difference between a fixture's rated life and the life it actually gets.
What fails, and in what order, is predictable. Powder coat goes first: it chalks, then fades, then lifts at the edges, and once it lifts the substrate underneath is exposed. Polycarbonate and acrylic lenses yellow and then go brittle, which costs you light output long before anything breaks. Silicone gaskets harden, shrink and stop sealing. Any cable jacket that sees direct sun — a run up a trunk, a leader into a fixture, a length crossing rock rather than buried under it — cracks along its length, and once it cracks the copper is on its own.
The material answer is unglamorous and it is the reason we specify the way we do: solid brass and solid copper do not have a finish to lose. They patina. A brass fixture in Scottsdale at year eight looks older than it did at year one and works exactly as well; a painted aluminium fixture at year eight looks like something you want to take out of the garden. Cast aluminium and moulded plastic are cheaper on the bid and more expensive over the life of the system, and in this sun the gap is wider than it is anywhere in Texas.
The cable jacket point is why we run conduit on desert properties even where nothing obliges us to. Sun-cracked insulation on an above-grade run is a failure that repeats every few years until somebody re-pulls the run properly.
People assume an LED that is rated for fifty thousand hours will give them fifty thousand hours. That number comes from a laboratory at a controlled temperature. What actually governs how long the light lasts is the junction temperature of the diode and the temperature the driver electronics run at, and in a Scottsdale summer both of those start the day higher than the lab ever tested.
Ambient air above 110°F is only the beginning of it. A well fixture or a bullet sitting in a bed of decomposed granite or rip-rap is not living in air temperature — it is sitting on a surface that has been absorbing direct sun since nine in the morning and is radiating it back all afternoon. Rock beds are thermal mass. A fixture set into one is in an oven with the door shut, and the electrolytic capacitors inside a driver are the shortest-lived component in the whole system when they are held hot.
Three things follow from that, and they drive most of what we specify here:
None of this makes a system immortal. It makes the difference between replacing electronics on your schedule and replacing them on the desert's.
Dallas–Fort Worth takes fixtures out with water: humidity, standing water in a well light, corrosion at a connection. Scottsdale almost never does. What it does instead is quieter and easier to miss, because nothing breaks.
Fine dust settles on every lens, every day, and it does not rain often enough to wash it off. The system does not fail; it dims. Because it dims evenly and gradually across every fixture at once, the owner's eye adapts with it, and the usual conclusion a year or two in is that the LEDs must be wearing out. Most of the time they are not. The lenses are dirty, and a rag brings the property back.
Monsoon dust storms accelerate all of it — a wall of grit driven at speed finds every gasket seam, every vent, every lens edge. And the same dry air that keeps corrosion away is hard on the elastomers: gaskets and O-rings that would stay supple in Texas humidity dry out, shrink and lose their seal, which is what lets the next dust event get inside the fixture rather than settle on it.
So serviceability is a design input here in a way it is not in Texas. A flush-lens fixture you can wipe in one pass is worth more over ten years than a deeply recessed one that holds dust in a ring you cannot reach. Fixtures set where somebody can actually get to them beat fixtures buried in the middle of a cactus bed. And a property in this climate genuinely benefits from a lens wipe on a schedule — it is the cheapest lumen you will ever buy.
From roughly July into September the pattern flips. Storms build off the high ground and arrive fast, and the rain that comes with them arrives all at once. The ground does not help: sun-baked desert soil and decomposed granite shed water rather than absorb it, so a storm that would soak into a Texas lawn runs across an Arizona lot instead, finds the low line, and leaves along it.
For a lighting system that means two specific vulnerabilities, and they are both about where the wire is rather than what the fixture is.
The first is erosion. Sheet flow strips the top inches off a slope, and a cable that was buried at a respectable depth in April can be sitting proud of the grade by September — exposed to sun, to feet, to a rake. The second is the washes. Most desert lots have at least one natural drainage line through them, dry three hundred days a year and carrying moving water and rock for a few hours at a time. A wire run laid straight across a wash is the most vulnerable thing on the property, and it is also the run most likely to have been put in by somebody who visited in February.
We route around a wash where the design allows it and cross it in conduit, properly deep, where it does not. Connections go above the line water is going to reach, not at the convenient height. Fixture bodies get set so they drain rather than fill. None of this is exotic — it is the same conduit-first habit we bring to every property, applied to the one season a year that tests it.
If an existing system on your property goes dark in August, the wash crossing and the eroded slope are the first two places to look. In our experience they account for far more monsoon call-outs than lightning ever does.
This is the part of an Arizona job that surprises contractors who have only worked east of it. Much of the Valley sits over caliche — a hardpan of calcium carbonate that has cemented the soil into something close to weak concrete. It can be a few inches thick or a few feet. Above and around it you get decomposed granite, rock and buried boulders that no survey told anybody about.
A trench that takes an afternoon in Dallas clay can take a day and a half here, and there are runs that simply cannot be cut on the line you would have chosen. Real desert installations get designed around that: routes follow softer ground, cross under existing hardscape where a sleeve already exists, and sometimes take a longer way round because the short way is through rock. It is also why a bid priced on Texas trenching assumptions is a bid that is going to come back and ask for more money.
There is a second-order problem in the same ground. Decomposed granite and rip-rap beds look like they are protecting the cable underneath them, and they are not. Cable laid shallow under DG is invisible, un-markable and exactly at the depth a landscaper re-grading a bed or a homeowner setting a new agave is going to find it with a shovel. Conduit is the answer to that on day one, not on the day it gets cut — which is the same argument we make in Texas, with harder ground and a better hit rate behind it.
| Dallas–Fort Worth | Scottsdale | |
|---|---|---|
| What takes fixtures out | Water, humidity, corrosion at connections | UV, heat at the driver, dust in the seals |
| Ground | Blackland clay — heavy, but it cuts | Caliche, decomposed granite, buried rock |
| Worst season | Spring storms, hail, freeze events | Monsoon runoff, July–September |
| Cable risk | Edger, shovel, aerator | Erosion exposure, wash crossings, shovel in DG beds |
| Canopy to work with | Mature live oak — dense, holds a shadow | Palo verde and mesquite — open, sparse |
| Main design constraint | Neighbours, glare, the street | All of that, plus a dark sky the city protects |
Moonlighting is the technique TC Lighting is known for in Texas: fixtures mounted high in a mature tree, aimed down through the crown, so what lands on the ground carries the pattern of the branches. People ask for it here by name, and the honest answer is that it works in Scottsdale on a minority of properties rather than most of them — and which minority is decided by what is growing in the garden.
Mesquite is the one that works. It is branchy, it has real interior structure, and it grows tall enough to mount in. Where a property has a mature mesquite, that is where the downlights go and the effect is every bit as good as a live oak. Ironwood is the next best: slower and denser, often with a tighter crown, and old specimens carry enough limb structure to light from above. Palo verde will not do it. The canopy is open and the leaves are fine, so light passes through rather than being interrupted — uplighting the green trunk and the limb structure is gorgeous, but waiting for a dappled pool of shadow underneath is waiting for something that is not going to arrive. A saguaro hosts nothing at all: nothing is drilled into it, mounted on it or trenched through its root plate.
Here is the part that is specific to the desert, and it is the thing most people get wrong when they ask for this by name. In Texas the pattern is made largely by foliage: a live oak crown is dense enough that the leaves themselves break the beam up. Desert trees do not work that way. Mesquite and ironwood leaves are small, fine and sparse, and they interrupt very little. What makes the pattern here is the branch structure — the limbs, the forks and the twig mass. That changes how a fixture is placed: it is aimed to rake through the limb architecture rather than to flood the leaf canopy, and a tree with a beautiful crown but a plain, open interior will throw almost nothing on the ground however good the fixture is. We look at the skeleton of the tree in daylight before anybody promises you a result.
The second desert-specific thing is what the light lands on. A shadow pattern needs a surface that will hold it, and in Texas that is nearly always mown lawn, which is flat, pale and even. A Sonoran garden underneath the tree is usually decomposed granite, gravel, flagstone or a mix. Fine decomposed granite holds a pattern well and is arguably prettier than grass for it, because the warm ground colour lifts the contrast. Coarse rip-rap and large cobble do not: the surface is broken up at roughly the same scale as the shadows, and the two cancel each other out. If the only ground under the candidate tree is heavy cobble, we will say so rather than take the money.
The mounting is harder here than in Texas and that is worth saying before anyone quotes you a price for it. Desert trees are frequently multi-trunked rather than single-stemmed, the limbs are more brittle than oak, and several of them are thorny enough to make working at height genuinely slow. Hardware has to allow for girth so nothing girdles a limb as it thickens, and on a tree that was never pruned for access there is often no clean line from the mount to the target at all.
Two things decide whether it reads as moonlight or as a floodlight in a tree, and both are easy to get wrong:
Then there is wind, which the desert supplies generously. A fixture twenty feet up is a long lever: a mount that shifts a couple of degrees in a monsoon gust moves the pattern several feet on the ground, and a fixture clamped to a whippy outer limb will not hold its aim through a single season. Mounts go on structural limbs close to the trunk, where the tree moves least, and the cable is left with enough slack to take that movement rather than being drawn tight across a fork.
One thing works in your favour. A downlight aimed from height, shielded, pointing at the ground is the sort of fixture a dark-sky ordinance is happy with — it is uplighting that spills into the sky, not this. The constraint described further up this page pushes a design toward exactly the technique people came here asking about.
A note on the photograph below. Every Arizona project in our library so far has been lit from below rather than from above, because that is what those properties wanted, so the moonlighting photograph here is a Texas one. We would rather show you the technique honestly captioned than caption an uplit desert tree as something it is not. When a Scottsdale mesquite gets the treatment, that photograph will replace this one.
On a Sonoran property the built structures carry more of the lighting than the planting does, which is the reverse of a Texas garden. The plant palette is sculptural and sparse; the walls, terraces and ramadas are continuous. So hardscape is not an add-on to the plan here, it is frequently most of it.
Walls. Stucco, adobe and rammed earth take a wash beautifully — a broad soft gradient up a flat wall is one of the few places a wide beam is the right answer. Block and stone walls are the opposite: graze them from close in at a tight angle so the courses and the joint lines throw their own shadows. The difference between a wall that looks lit and a wall that looks textured is almost entirely the distance the fixture sits off it.
Steps and grade changes. These are the part of the plan that is about not falling over, and desert properties have a lot of them. The light belongs on the tread rather than in the eye of whoever is coming up, which usually means recessed into the riser, tucked under a nosing, or thrown from a seat wall alongside. Getting a fixture into a riser means drilling masonry that often sits on caliche, so the route for the cable gets decided at the same time as the fixture position rather than after.
Ramadas and covered patios. A ramada has a ceiling, and a ceiling is the easiest soft light on any property — downlights set into it put light on the table, the floor and the faces of the people sitting there with nothing visible doing the work. It is the single most under-used opportunity on the desert properties we see.
Boulders and rock groupings. Graze, never flood. A boulder lit from the front is a grey lump; the same boulder lit from close in at a raking angle shows every fracture and change of plane. And it holds up in summer: stone does not mind 110°F, which is more than can be said for the fixture sitting next to it — see the heat section above for why what we bolt to it is brass rather than aluminium.
Commercial and site work follows the same rules at a larger scale: pole, site and hardscape lighting covers car parks, drives and retaining walls on bigger properties.
Arizona takes light pollution more seriously than most of the country, and Scottsdale is no exception — the city has had outdoor lighting provisions on the books for a long time and it is the city, not your contractor, that sets what is permitted. Anyone designing here should be checking the current requirements with the City of Scottsdale for the specific property before anything is specified, and we do. We are not going to quote you a lumen cap or a colour temperature limit from memory on a web page; the code is the code, and it changes.
What we can tell you is how it changes the design, because it does, and mostly for the better:
The happy accident is that a design built to those rules is usually the better-looking design anyway. Restraint reads as expensive.
Forty years of lighting Texas live oaks teaches you to think in canopies: get fixtures up into a dense crown, aim down, and let the branch structure draw the shadow. A Sonoran plant palette gives you almost none of that. The plants are sculptural rather than voluminous, and the job becomes describing a shape instead of filling a volume.
The other half of the palette is the architecture, and desert architecture is generous to lighting: stucco and adobe take a wash beautifully, ramadas and deep covered patios are natural homes for downlights, and rock walls and boulder groupings grazed at a tight angle produce the kind of texture a Texas brick elevation never will.
Every photograph below is a TC Lighting installation in Arizona, shot on the property at night. Click any of them to see it full screen.
There is no local subcontractor holding your project together while we are back in Texas. The people who build a Scottsdale job are the same people who build a Colleyville one, and the van they arrive in is ours.
No Scottsdale 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.
“Todd / TC Lighting was remarkably responsive. Quick to visit with me to create a vision for my backyard lighting. Todd instinctively knew what I wanted and what I needed. The crew did a terrific job in upgrading my lighting. The team went above and beyond. Bonus — the price is reasonable…”
“We have worked with Todd for more than 20 years (three different homes), and have found his design and services to be the utmost in quality, creative, dependable and customer service focused. The outcome achieved by his mastery of outdoor lighting is spectacular, and we highly recommend him!”
“March 2019 was the first time I used TC lighting and met the owner Todd Cormier. I interviewed a number of lighting companies over a two week period and decided to use TC Lighting as I felt Todd was truly a lighting architect and really understood what we were looking for…”
Arizona is the one place outside Texas we keep going back to, and we bring our own van and crew for it. Free on-site design visit, and Todd comes out himself.
Scottsdale, AZ · 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 Scottsdale 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.
Yes — with our own van, our own crew and our own materials, which is the only way a travel job is worth doing. Todd Cormier makes the design visit and is on site while the work is being built, exactly as he is on a Dallas–Fort Worth project. What changes on an Arizona job is the scheduling: the work is planned as a continuous block rather than spread across weeks, so tell us early if you have a date you are working towards.
Three things: sun, ground and sky. Extreme UV and summer heat above 110°F attack finishes, lenses, gaskets and the driver electronics far harder than anything in Texas, which changes what is worth specifying. Caliche and decomposed granite change how and where wire can be run. And Scottsdale protects its night sky, so the design has to be shielded, aimed and restrained rather than bright. The craft is the same. The engineering around it is not.
Usually the driver electronics, because heat is what ages them and a fixture sitting in a sun-loaded rock bed runs far hotter than the air temperature suggests. After that it is anything with a finish or a seal — powder coat chalking, lenses yellowing, gaskets drying out and shrinking. Dust is a separate issue: it does not break anything, it just steals output gradually until the system reads dim.
Often not. In this climate the most common cause by a distance is dust on the lenses, which builds up evenly across every fixture and dims the whole property so gradually that the eye adapts with it. Clean the lenses first. If it is still dim after that, then it is worth looking at output depreciation, voltage at the far end of a run, or a driver on its way out.
Yes, where the trees will hold it. Mature mesquite is the best host the desert offers and ironwood is close behind — both are branchy enough to mount in and dense enough to throw a real shadow. Palo verde will not hold a moonlight pattern because light passes through the canopy, and nothing is ever mounted on a saguaro. If your garden has a mature mesquite, that is where the downlights go.
Hardscape is usually the larger half of a desert plan. Walls, steps, seat walls, ramada ceilings, pool decks and boulder groupings all take light well, and the built structures here are more continuous than the planting is. Stucco and adobe get washed; block, stone and boulders get grazed from close in so the texture reads. On larger and commercial sites the same work runs under pole, site and hardscape lighting.
Yes, but not by attaching anything to it. Saguaros are protected in Arizona and are the wrong structure to mount to in any case. We light them from a distance with a narrow beam, grazing up the ribs so the pleating reads, and we keep trenching well clear of the root plate, which spreads much wider and shallower than most people expect.
It is the season that finds every shortcut. Sheet flow strips slopes and can leave shallow cable sitting on the surface by September, and any run laid straight across a wash is exposed to moving water and rock. We route around washes where the design allows and cross them in conduit, deep, where it does not, and we keep connections above the line water will reach.
On all of our lighting, line voltage and low voltage alike, the same as in Texas. If anything the argument is stronger here: sun destroys any cable jacket that sees daylight, decomposed granite beds hide shallow cable exactly where a shovel will find it, and monsoon erosion uncovers what was buried. Conduit is what stops all three, from the day the cable goes in the ground.
Often, yes, and on a travel job it is worth telling us up front what is already in the ground — existing sleeves, an existing transformer position or a usable run can change what the work costs. Send photographs with the address when you get in touch and Todd will tell you what is reusable before anybody drives anywhere.
Four fields, about fifteen seconds. Send the address and what you are hoping to light, and Todd will tell you straight away whether the trip makes sense for your project — before anybody talks about price.
Prefer to talk? Call (972) 345-1180.