Landscape Lighting Design in Owensboro, KY

Why a design comes before a price

Most outdoor lighting quotes are built by walking a property once and counting fixtures. The number that comes back is a guess about how many lights it will take, and it has to be padded, because the person who wrote it does not yet know where the cable will run or how much voltage will be left at the end of it.

We do it the other way around. The property gets drawn first, and the drawing tells us what it needs.

The consultation

A designer comes out and walks the property with you. This carries no charge and takes about an hour. We are looking at the architecture, the planting, the grade, the sight lines from inside the house, and the places you actually stand at night. You are deciding whether you want to work with us.

Before that visit ends you have rough budget ranges for each area of the property. Nobody has signed anything.

The design fee

If you want the drawing, we quote a design fee scaled to the size of the property and the hours the plan will take. A larger home with a pool, mature trees and a long approach takes considerably more drawing than a town lot.

We are one of the few companies in this region that charges for design, and we are direct about why: the drawing is real work, it belongs to you, and it is the reason the system still makes sense in fifteen years.

Zones

The finished plan divides your property into zones. Typically: the front elevation, each side, the rear, the pool, the trees and the drive. Every zone is drawn in full and priced on its own.

That structure exists because almost nobody lights an entire property at once, and we would rather you did it in the order that makes sense for you. Take the front this year. Take the pool when the pool is finished. When you come back to us in four years, the plan for that zone is already drawn, the transformer already has capacity allowed for it, and the new work matches the old instead of looking like an addition.

What is actually on the drawing

• Every fixture, by position, type and manufacturer
• Every cable run and its gauge, with the path it takes
• Transformer locations, capacity and the zones on each
• Lamp specification for each fixture: wattage, beam spread, and colour temperature in Kelvin
• The aiming intent for each fixture, which is what makes a re-aim possible years later

There are roughly fifteen decisions behind every lamp on that list. How bright. How wide. How warm. Whether it is grazing a surface or washing it. Whether it will still be right when the shrub in front of it has doubled in size.

The part most people have never considered

Low voltage means twelve volts at the fixture, stepped down from household current by a transformer. That sounds simpler than line voltage and in one way it is, but it introduces a problem line voltage does not have: voltage drop.

Push twelve volts down a long enough cable with enough fixtures on it and the last lamp in the run receives noticeably less than the first. It burns dimmer, it shifts colour, and it fails early. Getting that right across a property is a calculation, not an instinct, and it is the single most common thing we find wrong in systems installed by people who mostly do something else for a living.

Ask an electrician whether they can install low-voltage lighting and most will say yes. What they know thoroughly is line voltage. The two trades share a word and very little else.

Then we order it

We do not stock fixtures or lamps. We stock transformers, because there are only a couple of sensible choices, and nothing else.

Every job is ordered against its own drawing, usually across about three manufacturers, chosen because each does one thing on your property better than the others. You will not find these fixtures at a hardware store; the manufacturers we buy from sell only to professional lighting companies and back the product with warranties they actually honour.

It does mean that if you come to our office expecting a showroom wall of fixtures to choose from, there is not one. What we have instead is your drawing.