Landscape lighting
Light the oak. Leave the rest dark.
Good lighting is mostly restraint. Pick the things worth seeing — the live oak, the porch columns, the path to the door — and let everything else fall away. Done right, the house looks better at 9pm than it does at noon.
Get a free estimateServices
Everything after dark.
Lighting design
We walk the property in daylight to find what's worth lighting, then come back after dark with fixtures on a cord and show you. You approve what you can actually see, not a drawing.
Low-voltage LED installation
12V systems with wire sized for the run so the last fixture is as bright as the first. Wire buried at depth, waterproof connections, transformer sized with headroom for the fixtures you'll want to add in two years.
Tree uplighting
Live oaks, palmettos and crape myrtles are the best thing a Charleston yard has going for it at night. Fixtures set back from the trunk, aimed up through the canopy, on adjustable mounts so they can move as the tree grows.
Façade & architectural
Columns, shutters, dormers, brick and stucco washing, soffit-mounted downlighting that reads like moonlight. Enough to shape the house, not so much that it looks like a car dealership.
Path, step & dock lighting
Walkways, stairs, decks and docks lit so people can see where their feet go without staring into a bulb. Low glare, fixtures tucked into planting where possible.
Brass & copper for the islands
Salt air destroys cheap aluminium and plastic fixtures. On Sullivan's, IOP, Kiawah, Seabrook and anything on the marsh, we fit solid brass or copper — it weathers to a patina instead of corroding through.
Controls & timers
Astronomic timers that follow sunset through the year, photocells, and app-based control if you want zones on different schedules — path lights until midnight, trees until eleven.
Repairs & restoration
Dead transformers, corroded sockets, buried fixtures swallowed by shrubs, halogen systems worth converting to LED, and aiming that's drifted years out of true. We'll bring an existing system back rather than sell you a new one.
How we think about it
Fewer fixtures, better placed.
- Warm 2700K light — the colour of a porch lamp, not a parking lot
- Fixtures hidden; you see the light, not the hardware
- Contrast matters more than brightness — dark space is part of the design
- Nothing aimed into a window, a neighbour's yard, or oncoming drivers
- Wire buried and sized so voltage doesn't sag down the run
- Room left on the transformer for what you add later
- Aimed after dark, with you standing there, before we call it done
Common questions
Before you call.
Isn't landscape lighting a maintenance headache?
Only when it's built cheaply. Low-voltage LED fixtures draw very little power and last for years; the failure points are almost always undersized wire, connections that weren't waterproofed, and plastic fixtures on a salt-air property. We use brass and copper near the water and seal every connection.
How long does an installation take?
Most lighting installs are a single day, with the aiming done after dark that same evening. Larger properties take longer — you get the schedule with the estimate.
Can you add to a system I already have?
Usually. The limit is transformer capacity and wire gauge. We'll check what's there, tell you how many fixtures it can carry, and what it would take to go further.
See it before you buy it.
We'll walk the property after dark with fixtures in hand so you can see the design before committing to it. No charge.