Exterior lighting built for the North Hills

Wooded lots change the plan

A lot of North Hills properties sit on wooded, hilly lots with long driveways and mature trees close to the house. That changes two things: the roofline lighting design has to account for tree shadow at night, and the landscape package often does more work, since a driveway winding through trees needs its own path lighting to be safe after dark.

We design around both in the same visit. The render mock-up shows the roofline lighting on the actual house, and the landscape plan gets sketched against your specific tree line, not a generic yard.

A lot of these lots also sit far enough back from the road that a house is barely visible from the street until the driveway lighting leads the eye in. That makes entry and driveway lighting less of an afterthought here than it is on a tighter suburban lot with a short, straight approach.

The homes we see most

Fox Chapel and Allison Park skew toward larger stone and brick homes with a lot of roofline and multiple gables, which means more zones to light and more scenes worth having. Wexford and Gibsonia run newer, with cleaner lines and vinyl or fiber cement siding that takes color-matched track just as well with the right mounting approach.

Whatever the exterior material, the aluminum track is matched to the trim color and mounted tight to the fascia, so from the street it reads as a clean roofline, not a visible product.

Every component is UL, ETL and CUL certified and Thraxel carries full insurance on every North Hills job, which tends to matter more here than in a smaller town given how many of these properties also run through a property management company or association overseeing exterior work.

• Multi-gable roofs get zoned separately so scenes can run independently
• Wooded driveways commonly pair path lighting with roofline lighting
• Stone and brick facades take well to uplighting alongside the roofline system

What the system does once it is on

Every install is app-controlled from day one, and works with Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit and Control4 for homes that already run a smart-home platform. Scenes on the site include Everyday Warm, Game Day, Christmas, July 4th and Halloween, plus Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day.

Because the pixels are individually addressable, a large multi-zone North Hills roofline does not run as one block of color. Peaks, columns and soffits can each be set independently, which matters more on a house with several rooflines than it does on a simple ranch.

Financing at 0% APR for up to 24 months is available to qualifying buyers, and every install carries a 3-year parts warranty and a 1-year labor warranty, the same coverage used across the rest of the service area regardless of house size.

HOA and community considerations

Several North Hills developments run through a homeowners association, and lighting rules come up on nearly every consult in this part of the county. The track is effectively invisible by day, which has kept it out of trouble in every HOA Thraxel has worked in.

If your street has a design-review process, bring the render mock-up to the board before install day. It shows exactly what the finished roofline will look like at night, which tends to move approvals along faster than a written description would.

Fox Chapel in particular has areas with additional zoning and appearance considerations given its larger, more established lots, so starting the consultation early enough to clear any local review process before a target install date is worth planning for.

What it runs, honestly

Nationally, permanent roofline installs commonly land somewhere between $20 and $50 per linear foot, and landscape fixtures between roughly $150 and $400 installed per fixture. Every North Hills quote is property-specific, and a larger roofline with several gables tends to land on the higher end of that range simply because there is more track and more zones.

Once installed, the electric cost stays small. A typical 168-LED install running six hours a night runs about $52.80 a year, since each pixel draws roughly 0.3 watts, regardless of how large the house is behind it.

For a North Hills household weighing whether the investment is worth it, Thraxel's 2023 to 2025 residential tracking shows an average appraised value increase of 3 to 7 percent on homes with the system installed, a directional figure based on past projects rather than a promise for any specific property.

Getting started from the North Hills

We come to you for a free on-site consultation and bring a demo case, four live RGBWW strips on 128 LEDs, so you can run colors from the app in your own driveway before deciding on anything. A render mock-up of your specific house follows within 48 hours.

Reach out at thraxel.com/quote/ or see the full permanent system spec at thraxel.com/permanent/. Most North Hills installs finish in one to two days start to finish.

The visit wraps with a final walkthrough, going over how to switch scenes and set up any smart-home integration before the crew heads back north, so a North Hills homeowner is not left figuring out the app alone on the first cold night.

For a household still deciding between a permanent system and one classic season of C9 lighting, thraxel.com/blog/permanent-vs-seasonal-christmas-lights/ lays out the tradeoffs plainly, useful before committing to either program on a larger North Hills roofline.

If your street runs its own architectural review, mentioning that up front on the first call lets the render mock-up double as the document you bring to that meeting, rather than scheduling a second visit later just to produce paperwork the board already needed to see.