Permanent Holiday
Lighting in
Upper St. Clair, PA

The first European settler in what is now Upper St. Clair was John Fife, who settled near the intersection of Washington and McLaughlin Run roads in 1762, and the township was incorporated in 1788 and named after General Arthur St. Clair. The relevant history for a roofline system, though, is much more recent.

The population was 3,629 at the 1950 census, 19,023 by 1980, 19,229 in 2010 and 21,160 at the 2020 census, a 10.0 percent increase over the decade. Almost the entire township was built in a thirty-year window.

That window produced a specific kind of house. Suburban construction from that period typically means ranches, split-levels and colonials, with long low horizontal eaves, garage-forward gables and wide plain fascia board. The long horizontal is the best case there is for a continuous line, because the architecture already wants to be read as a horizontal and the light simply agrees with it.

The split-level is the interesting exception. Its roof planes step, and a run that ignores the step by carrying one height across the whole front makes the house look like it was drawn wrong. Following the step costs a little more line and reads correctly.

Density here is 2,152.59 people per square mile across 9.82 square miles of land, which is suburban rather than rural or urban. Houses sit on real lots but within sight of each other, so a neighboring roofline is usually in the same field of view. Matching the height of a run to the adjacent eave line is often what separates a system that looks designed from one that looks added, and that comparison is available to anyone standing in the street.

Roughly 9 percent of the township's area, approximately 733 acres across 14 parks and multiple fields, is open green space. Where a property faces or backs onto that kind of open ground, established planting screens the sightline seasonally. Checking what the front of a house actually shows from the road in leaf, rather than in February, is worth the ten minutes before a layout is finalized.

The daytime read is straightforward on this housing stock and that is a genuine advantage. Painted or aluminum fascia in a builder's color gives a color-matched channel somewhere to disappear completely, and on a street where several houses share an era and a palette, the same match works along the row.

The tradeoff is that there is no ornament to hide behind, so a line that drifts even slightly over a long horizontal run is visible. Clean fascia is easy to work with and unforgiving about level.

With a median age of 42.9 at the 2020 census and a township that has been settled rather than churning, the case for a permanent system leans on the eleven months rather than the three weeks. A low horizontal eave carrying plain warm white is architectural lighting for most of the year. Color programming for December is an addition to that, not the reason for it, and on a house that will be owned for a long time that is usually the better way round.