Outdoor lighting and audio
for Houston commercial spaces.
For restaurants, retail and mixed-use, HOAs, office campuses, and property developers who care about how an outdoor space reads after dark. Designed in-house, installed in-house, and built to run reliably.
How a system gets designed.
Outdoor lighting on a commercial property decides what the space looks like the moment customers, tenants, or residents arrive after dark. For a restaurant, it's whether the patio invites people in. For retail or mixed-use, whether the architecture and signage hold up at night. For an HOA or office campus, whether the common areas feel maintained and intentional or generic. The result is a design decision more than a fixture decision.
I'm an ILLI-certified lighting designer. The principles I apply on every commercial project come directly out of that training.
A restaurant patio at 7pm on a Friday is a different lighting problem than the same patio at 3pm. The decisions that shape how a commercial space reads at night come from observing how it actually gets used after dark, not from a daytime walk-through. We do both, and the night walk is where the design starts to take shape.
Color temperature, beam spread, mounting height, and fixture placement are chosen for the property in front of us. The texture on a stone facade, the warmth a brand wants to project, the way signage should read after dark. We don't pull from a template. Every fixture is specified for the job it's doing.
What we don't light matters as much as what we do. For a restaurant, it's the contrast that makes a patio feel like an experience. For retail, it's drawing the eye to the entry instead of washing the storefront flat. For an HOA or office campus, it's keeping the safety paths bright while the rest of the property stays inviting and not over-lit. Shadow is part of the design.
A residential outdoor system runs three or four hours a night. A commercial system can run twelve. Wire is sized for the actual load. Transformers are chosen with voltage drop on the longest runs in mind. Every splice is a waterproof, direct-burial connector. The technical side of the system gets the same depth of attention as the design side, because a system that fails in six months is a problem you'll be living with.
Property types we take on.
These are the kinds of commercial properties where outdoor lighting and audio earns its weight. If your project doesn't appear here, it's worth a conversation anyway.
The Roofless Church, New Harmony, IN.
The Roofless Church is an open-air interdenominational chapel designed by Philip Johnson in 1960, with a bronze sculpture by Jacques Lipchitz inside the shingled baldachin and a gilded Lipchitz gate at the eastern entrance. I worked on the lighting for this property as part of my ILLI Intensive Course in 2023, and our cohort was invited back the following year to install the lighting permanently.
The same approach to architecture, shadow, color, and engineering that produces a result like this is what I bring to every commercial property in Houston.
Photos: Tim Ryan and Kellan Vincent. Lighting designed and installed by the 2023 ILLI cohort.
How commercial projects work.
What we don't do.
It's more useful to be straightforward about where we're not the right contractor than to pitch every job. If your project sits outside what we do well, we'll tell you that directly so you can find the right team for it.
Send us your project details.
A brief description of the property, the scope, and your timeline is enough to start. We review every commercial inquiry and respond within two business days, either with next steps or an honest assessment of fit.
Commercial inquiries go directly to the project lead, not a contact form queue. Please use email or phone rather than the residential quote form.