Lighting Your HOA's Entrance and Common Areas
If you've driven around the East Valley at night you've seen this. A nice master-planned neighborhood, a big stone monument at the entrance with the name in raised letters, and the light on it is pointed at about half the letters while the other half are dark, or there's a single floodlight blasting the whole thing white so you can't really read the name at all. Sometimes the fixture's just dead and nobody's noticed for a year.
I do a fair amount of HOA work in Gilbert, Queen Creek and Mesa, and most of it starts with a board member who drove in one night and thought, that looks bad.
The entrance is the front door for a few hundred houses
It's the first thing people see of the neighborhood, whether that's a buyer coming to look at a house, a delivery driver or somebody's parents coming to visit. It's also how realtors take the "community" shots for listings. A well lit entrance tells people the place is taken care of. A dark one or a badly lit one says the opposite, even if every yard inside is perfect.
Monument signs are pretty simple to light well. The trick is grazing the face from a low angle so the raised letters throw a little shadow and stand out, instead of hitting it straight on, which flattens everything. Usually that means two fixtures set low and back a bit on each side so the light crosses evenly, and then some soft uplighting on any trees or palms around the sign to frame it. Warm light, not cold blue. And aimed so it doesn't shine into the eyes of somebody driving in.
Common areas and walking paths
A lot of neighborhoods here have greenbelts, retention basins that double as parks, and walking paths that connect everything. Those get used early in the morning and after dark for most of the year, because that's when it's cool enough to walk the dog. So path lighting on the main walking routes is mostly a safety thing, and in a retention area where the ground slopes and dips it really matters.
The ramadas and the mailbox clusters are the other spots people tend to forget. If residents are picking up mail at 8 at night in December, that cluster should be lit.
What's different about doing it for a board
A few things. Budgets get approved once a year, so I try to give boards a plan they can do in phases if needed, entrance first, then main paths, then everything else. Boards also change over, so I put everything in writing, including where the transformers are and what's on which zone, because the next president is going to need it and nobody remembers what the last one decided.
Durability matters even more than it does on a house. Common area fixtures get hit by mowers and kicked by kids and once in a while somebody backs a truck over one, and nobody’s looking at them every night, so I’d rather spend the budget on a smaller number of heavy brass fixtures that the management company never has to call me about. The wire gets buried properly and the timer runs on sunset, which means nobody on the board has to remember to change it twice a year.
And the dark sky question comes up in some communities, especially the ones out toward Fountain Hills or anywhere with mountain views. Shielded, downward-aimed fixtures keep most of that light out of the sky, which keeps the residents who moved there for the stars happy.
Holiday lighting at the entrance
This is where a lot of boards end up spending money every year without really thinking about it, paying a seasonal crew to put up and take down lights on the entrance and monument. Some communities have been switching the entrance over to permanent trim, which I wrote about in a post about HOAs and permanent lighting. It's a one time cost versus paying every year, and the board can change colors for whatever holiday is coming up from a phone.
If you're on a board
Drive in at night and look at your entrance like you've never seen it. If you're squinting at the sign or half the fixtures are out, it's worth a walkthrough. We'll come out after dark, go over the entrance and the common areas with whoever's on the landscape committee, and put together something the board can actually vote on.
And if your management company has been "looking into" a dark monument sign since last spring, you're definitely not the only one.
— Sam
Desert Outdoor Lighting has served the Phoenix Valley since 2004. We're licensed and bonded (ROC# 340142) and install landscape lighting and Gemstone permanent trim lighting in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe, Queen Creek and across the Valley. Call (480) 809-7800 or request a free after-dark design visit.