Landscape Lighting in Sevierville, TN

We do landscape design walks after dark with a portable fixture, because beam angles and shadows do not show up on a daytime site plan. You see what a given tree looks like uplit before we bury a single wire.

That walk also settles the arguments — whether the big oak takes two fixtures or three, whether the stone column wants a graze or a wash, whether path lights should run both sides of the walk or one.

You approve what you have already seen, which is a much better way to spend money on lighting.

We use brass and copper fixtures rather than the aluminum and composite units sold in kits. Aluminum corrodes in our humidity and cheap composite housings crack after two winters, which is why so many DIY systems are half-dead by year three.

Brass weathers to a patina and keeps working. It costs more up front and it stops being a topic of conversation, which is the goal.

Runs get buried at proper depth, connections are waterproof-rated, and the transformer is sized with headroom so you can add fixtures later without replacing it.

Sloped and wooded lots are the norm here, and they are the best case for uplighting. A few well-placed fixtures on mature trees turns a dark hillside into depth you can see from the road.

Cabins with heavy timber and stone get grazing — a fixture close to the surface, aimed up, to bring out texture. On a stacked-stone chimney it is the single most dramatic thing you can do.

Long gravel or curved driveways off the main roads get path and directional lighting, both for looks and because navigating them in the dark in December is otherwise a guessing game.

Customers who have both end up with the better-looking property, because landscape lighting supplies the base layer and the Christmas display sits on top of it. The house is not a black shape with lights stapled to the edge.

We plan the two together when a customer wants both, matching color temperature so the December display does not clash with the year-round fixtures.

It also means we already know your property, your power locations and your access when the holiday crew shows up in the fall.

Every system runs off a multi-tap transformer sized with room to spare — usually 20 to 30 percent above the connected fixture load — so voltage drop does not dim the fixtures furthest from the box and so you can add a few more lights later without buying a second transformer.

Wire gets buried at a consistent depth along beds and lawn edges, not just laid on top of mulch and covered lightly, which is the shortcut that gets a run sliced by the next person who edges the bed with a spade.

We run 12- or 10-gauge cable on longer runs specifically to control voltage drop — a fixture at the end of 150 feet of undersized wire will visibly dim compared to one near the transformer, and gauge is the fix, not a brighter bulb.

Uplights sit at the base of a tree or column and throw light upward through the canopy or along a vertical surface — this is the single fixture most responsible for making a property look designed rather than just lit.

Path lights are aimed down and shielded so you see the walkway, not the bulb, spaced roughly eight to ten feet apart depending on the width of the path and how much overlap you want between pools of light.

Wash and graze fixtures serve stone and masonry differently — a wash sits back and lights a broad flat area evenly, while a graze sits close to the surface to exaggerate texture, which is why we ask what a wall or column is made of before we pick either.

Landscape lighting is designed to run every night of the year, not just in December, which is the main difference between it and a Christmas lease — the fixtures, wire and transformer are rated for continuous outdoor duty rather than a few months of use.

Most systems run on an astronomic timer that tracks actual sunset and sunrise for our latitude, so the lights come on at dusk in July and dusk in December without you resetting anything twice a year.

Customers who want it can add app-based zone control so the front bed runs on a different schedule than the back patio, but plenty of properties are perfectly served by one photocell and one timer and never touch it again.