Landscape Lighting
Installation in
Ben Avon Heights, PA

Ben Avon Heights can be described exactly. Walter Pringle Fraser bought 84 acres of the former Taylor farm, used forty of them for the Ben Avon Country Club and its golf course, and opened the remaining 44 acres for houses.

Building started in 1910, the borough incorporated in 1913, and today it contains 148 homes, a community park and the Shannopin Country Club clubhouse inside 0.17 square miles. Four hundred people lived here at the 2020 census.

A borough that small changes the brief. Every property line is a shared one and there is no anonymous middle distance to soak up glare.

On 44 acres of original plat, light added to one garden is visible from more houses than it would be on an ordinary suburban street. That is why aiming angles get judged from the neighbor's side of the hedge rather than from the client's own porch, and why shielded fixtures are the default here instead of an upgrade.

The land sits at about 1,135 feet, on a hill above the Ohio River roughly nine miles from Pittsburgh. Hilltop ground almost always means a climbing approach, and a driveway on a grade is the most useful thing on the property to light. Low light placed along the rise does more for footing than a bright lamp at the top, which flattens the slope visually and hides the steps in its own glare.

The river below sits several hundred feet lower, so the ground falls away on at least one side of most lots here. A boundary that drops out of sight needs a visible edge rather than a lit one.

The club and its golf course were carved out before a single house lot was sold, so properties backing onto that ground have a long unlit edge behind them and nothing beyond it. That edge is an asset worth protecting.

A garden set against open ground can be lit softly and still read as deep, because there is no competing light source behind it to collapse the distance. Aim outward across the boundary and the depth disappears immediately.

The houses went up as a single planned development from 1910 onward, which makes the stock unusually coherent. Where facades share a period and a scale, symmetry is doing most of the visual work, and a matched pair of uplights on a front elevation reads as deliberate. One lamp on one side of the same house does not, and on a street of 148 homes that inconsistency is noticed.

A community park sits inside the borough boundary, which is a lot of shared ground for 0.17 square miles. Public and private light meet quickly at that scale.

A scheme designed only for August also looks wrong by December, when the leaves are down and everything that was screened becomes visible from the road, so year-round design here means testing the plan against winter sightlines rather than summer ones. The median age was 39 years at the 2000 census, and a borough of 148 households changes hands slowly, so most schemes here are added to a landscape that has been settled for decades rather than started on bare ground.