Landscape Lighting in Henderson, KY

Ornament is the whole opportunity here

Henderson has five historic districts on the National Register, which is a remarkable number for a city its size: North Main Street, Alves, the Commercial District, the Cotton Mill Workers Housing District, and Audubon. Between them they cover a span of architecture and of social history that very few western Kentucky towns can match.

The reason is tobacco. Henderson was wealthy early, and that wealth went into houses. The prevailing styles across the older neighbourhoods are pre-Civil War, Italianate and late Victorian, with Craftsman bungalows arriving later, and what characterises all of them is surface incident: bracketed cornices, deep overhanging eaves, arched and hooded windows, turned porch posts, sawn trim, bay windows, decorative brickwork.

Every one of those features is a three-dimensional object casting a shadow, and that is precisely what makes them worth lighting. Italianate in particular rewards it more than almost any style we work with. The signature elements are heavy brackets under a wide eave and tall arched windows, and both only exist visually because of the shadow they throw. In flat afternoon light an Italianate cornice can read as a stripe. Light it at night from close to the wall, travelling upward, and every bracket suddenly has depth and the eave line becomes the strongest thing on the house.

The ornate Victorian houses work the same way and ask for more restraint, because there is so much detail that lighting all of it equally produces visual noise. We generally pick a hierarchy: the entry and porch first, the principal bay or turret second, the cornice line third, and let the rest of the elevation fall away. A Victorian house lit everywhere at once looks like a funfair; the same house lit in three deliberate moves looks like it did when somebody was proud of building it.

The Cotton Mill Workers Housing District is the useful counterweight, and we treat it very differently. Those are small, honest, closely spaced houses, and the correct lighting there is modest: a porch, a path, one tree. Anything more is out of scale with the street and out of sympathy with what the buildings are.

Out toward Audubon, the neighbourhood on the south side, and the woodland around John James Audubon State Park, properties get more ground and more canopy. Audubon was drawn to this area for its wooded hills and heavy vegetation, and that is still the defining quality out there. On those lots the trees do most of the work: canopy fixtures above, very little at ground level, and a boundary tree line lit so a large garden still has an edge after dark.