Outdoor Lighting in Bowling Green, KY

The low wide roof is the whole problem

Bowling Green was settled in the late 1790s and grew into the commercial and transportation centre for south-central Kentucky, and its four late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century residential historic districts reflect that: St. Joseph, Upper East Main Street, College Hill and Magnolia Street. The downtown commercial district runs from 1837 to 1940, and the ShakeRag District, the city's first on the National Register, carries its African American history.

Around College Hill in particular, what you find is bungalows and American Foursquares, and both present the same difficulty to anyone trying to light them.

A Foursquare is a two-storey cube with a hipped roof, wide overhanging eaves and a full-width front porch under its own low roof. A bungalow is lower still, with an even deeper porch and an enormous roof plane that dominates the elevation. In each case the porch roof projects out over most of the front of the house, and that projection is exactly where uplighting stops working.

Put a fixture in the bed at the front of the house and the beam hits the underside of the porch roof after four feet. The second storey and the gable never get lit at all, and what you have instead is a bright patch on a soffit and glare for anyone on the porch. It is the single most common mistake we are called to correct in this city.

There are three real answers and most Bowling Green houses use all three. The porch itself is lit from its own ceiling, the way you would light any roofed room, so it becomes usable rather than being a dark cave behind a lit facade. The upper storey and the hipped roof are lit from outside the porch footprint, either from further out in the lawn at a steeper angle or from a tree across the garden. And the horizontal line of the eave, which is the strongest architectural gesture either style has, gets treated as the feature it is rather than as an obstruction.

The other thing Bowling Green has in quantity is old street trees. The established neighbourhoods have genuine mature canopy, and on those streets we usually end up putting a substantial share of the budget thirty feet up rather than at ground level. Downlighting through an old maple or oak onto a Foursquare's front walk solves the porch-roof problem and the path lighting at the same time, and it does it without a single visible fixture at eye height.

Italianate is present here too, notably in landmarks like Riverview at Hobson Grove and the W.H. Everhardt House of 1879, with the arched windows, wide eaves and heavy brackets that style is known for. Those houses want grazing from close to the wall, which is the opposite of what the Foursquare down the street needs.