Permanent Holiday
Lighting in
Ben Avon Heights, PA

Ben Avon Heights is 0.2 square miles, all of it land, with a population of 400 at the 2020 census. The borough was incorporated in 1913 and now contains 148 homes, a community park and the clubhouse of the Shannopin Country Club. Numbers that small change what a lighting decision means.

In a township of thirty thousand, a roofline system is seen by the people who drive past. Here it is seen by the borough.

The housing has a clear origin. The Ben Avon Country Club golf course opened in 1910 on 40 acres, and when the club closed in 1917 the ground was divided into lots for additional housing. The Shannopin Country Club opened in 1920.

A neighborhood platted out of a golf course in the late 1910s and built out through the twenties tends to share an era, and shared era means shared roof geometry: comparable eave heights, comparable overhangs, comparable trim widths. Consistency like that is the friendliest possible case for a continuous line, because the same detail solves most of the houses.

Elevation does the rest of the work. The borough sits on a hill above the Ohio River at an average of 1,135 feet, nine miles from the city of Pittsburgh, bordered by Kilbuck Township to the north, east and west and by Avalon to the south. Hillside siting means the approach to most houses is not level.

From below, the underside of the eave and the gable end carry the line. From above, the ridge and the upper fascia do. A layout drawn on an elevation sketch will often disagree with what the street actually shows, which is why the sightline gets walked before anything gets specified.

Because the daytime read is a neighborhood matter here rather than a private one, the channel itself deserves more scrutiny than the light output does. Matched to the fascia color, a channel on painted trim is close to invisible from the road, and that is the entire point of a fixed system on a street of this size. What people register in July is a trim line.

What they register in December is color. The two should not be the same conversation, and on a 148-home borough the July version is the one that has to hold up for eleven months.

Programming is where a permanent system stops being a December purchase. Warm white along a level eave reads as architectural lighting for most of the year, closer to accent lighting than to decoration.

Softer, lower settings suit a borough where houses sit close enough that spill onto the next property is a real constraint rather than a theoretical one. Full color has its four days and then goes back in the box, except that nothing physically goes anywhere.

Two practical points. Anything mounted to the front of a house in a borough this small is a visible decision, so the fascia condition on each elevation is worth confirming before hardware is chosen rather than after. And whether any borough-level approval applies to exterior fixtures at a given address is a question worth asking up front, because a small municipality answers that faster than a large one.