Landscape Lighting
Installation in
Fox Chapel, PA

The density figure is the whole brief in Fox Chapel. The 2020 census counted 5,343 people across roughly 7.8 square miles, which works out at 679.1 per square mile, and the 2000 census recorded 1,942 housing units at an average of 247.9 per square mile. Those are estate numbers rather than subdivision numbers.

Houses sit back, drives run long, and a great many properties cannot be seen from the public road at all. Only 0.13 percent of the borough's area is water, so the ground is almost entirely buildable and almost entirely private.

That changes what a lighting plan is for. On a suburban lot the front elevation is the design.

Here the elevation is the last thing anyone sees, and everything before it is the approach: the turn-in, the length of the drive, the point where the house first becomes visible. Where that reveal happens is a decision, and it is made by where the first fixture is placed rather than by how bright any of them are.

Squaw Run and Pine Creek run through the borough. Where a property drops toward one of them the grade does the work, and light placed at the bottom of a slope aimed upward reads completely differently from the same fixture on level ground.

A valley gives a garden depth that a flat lawn has to fake. On any lot with mature trees, mounting up in a crown and letting light fall through the branches keeps hardware off the ground plane entirely, with the tradeoff that anything twenty feet up has to be reachable again later.

The Pittsburgh Field Club, established in 1882, moved to what is now Fox Chapel in 1915, and the Fox Chapel Golf Club opened in 1919. Both predate the borough, which was not incorporated until 1934, and that sequence explains the shape of the place. Properties bordering course land have an unlit edge behind them and effectively unlimited depth of field at night, which is the easiest condition in the world to light well and the easiest to spoil with one over-aimed fixture.

James Powers settled here around 1790, nearly a century and a half before the borough existed, and what was farmland became estate ground through the 1920s to the 1950s. Large houses from those decades tend to be broad rather than tall, with wings, entry courts and secondary elevations that carry as much weight as the front. A plan addressing only the front door leaves most of the building dark, and on a house of that footprint the dark parts are obvious. The median age was 44 at the 2000 census and median household income stood at $154,722 as of 2015, figures that describe settled, long-held property rather than a market with frequent turnover.

On large properties the request often starts as security, and it is worth saying plainly that floodlights are a poor tool for it. A bright source creates hard shadow immediately behind whatever it strikes, and anyone standing in that shadow is less visible than they would be under even, low light across the whole approach.

Uniformity beats brightness. That holds on a quarter acre and it holds across the seven and a half square miles of this borough.