Design process
You see your house lit before anyone touches a ladder
Design is not a form you fill out. It is a render mock-up of your specific house, built after someone walks the property, so you know exactly what November will look like before install day arrives.
Where design starts
Everything begins with a free on-site consultation. Someone walks the property, looks at the roofline, notes any porch, column or tree detail you want included, and asks what look you are actually going for, warm white, classic multicolor, or something in between.
This is also when practical questions get answered, like where power is available, whether an HOA has any expectations for takedown timing, and whether last year's layout is being repeated or changed.
Bringing a photo or two of a display you liked, from a magazine, a neighbor's house or a previous year of your own, gives the consultation something concrete to react to instead of describing a look from memory alone.
It also helps to walk the property together after dark, or near dusk, if the timing allows, since seeing where the house naturally falls into shadow shapes the design in ways a daytime visit alone can miss.
If more than one person in the household has an opinion on the design, it is worth having everyone weigh in before the consultation rather than after the render arrives, since it is easier to fold preferences in early than to redo a mock-up around a late objection.
It is fine to come in with no strong opinion at all, too. Plenty of homeowners simply want a professional recommendation for their specific home style, and that is a normal way to start the design conversation.
A recommendation in that case usually starts from the architecture itself, brick, stone, siding color and trim, since those details tend to point toward a color temperature and layout that will look intentional rather than generic.
What the render mock-up actually is
Within 48 hours of the consultation, you get a mock-up of your actual house, not a stock photo or a generic template. It shows the design applied to your specific roofline, porch and trees so there is no guessing what it will look like.
This step exists because a lighting plan described in words rarely matches what a homeowner is picturing. Seeing the real house lit, even as a render, catches mismatches before a crew is on site with materials.
It also gives you something to actually show a spouse, a neighbor or the rest of the family, rather than trying to describe a color scheme secondhand. A render settles that conversation quickly, since everyone is looking at the same image of the same house.
The turnaround matters as much as the accuracy. A 48-hour window keeps the design phase from dragging on for weeks, which is part of what makes it realistic to start the whole process in October and still be finished well before Thanksgiving.
Decisions worth thinking through before the consult
Warm white versus multicolor is the first fork in the road, and it shapes everything else in the design. A colonial with brick and stone trim often reads differently in warm white than a lighter-sided farmhouse does.
Beyond the roofline, think about which secondary features matter to you. Columns and porch trim add a finished look. Trees wrapped from the ground up bring the display into the yard instead of stopping at the eaves.
None of these decisions need to be locked in before the consultation. Talking through options with someone standing at your house is usually more useful than deciding alone ahead of time.
It also helps to think about how the display will be seen most often, from the street while driving up, from a neighbor's porch across the road, or from inside your own living room window looking out. Each vantage point favors slightly different design choices.
If a specific holiday, event or family tradition matters more to you than others, mention it. A design built primarily around a big Christmas Eve gathering can look a little different than one meant to carry a house through the whole season evenly.
- Warm white, multicolor, or a mix by section
- Porch, column and window trim, yes or no
- Which trees, if any, get wrapped
- Whether last year's layout is being kept or changed
How revisions work
If the render mock-up is not quite right, that is normal and expected. Adjustments happen before an install date is confirmed, not after a crew has already ordered materials for the wrong plan.
This is also where you can ask what a design would look like with fewer or more elements, since the mock-up makes those comparisons concrete instead of hypothetical.
There is no fixed limit on how many rounds of feedback a design goes through. Most homeowners settle on a plan after one round of adjustments, but a more involved change, like reconsidering the whole color scheme, simply gets a second look rather than being rushed toward install.
From an approved design to install day
Once you approve the render, the crew orders exactly what your house needs and locks in an install date. See thraxel.com/blog/what-to-expect-on-christmas-install-day/ for what happens once that date arrives.
If you like classic column and porch detail specifically, thraxel.com/blog/christmas-lighting-for-front-porches/ goes deeper on that piece. Start the process at thraxel.com/christmas/.
Homeowners around Mars and Cranberry Township often come back to the same approved design the following year with only minor tweaks, which is one more reason getting it right the first time through the mock-up is worth the extra round of review.
For homeowners further along in weighing a bigger change, thraxel.com/blog/renting-vs-owning-christmas-lights/ covers how a seasonal design conversation compares to committing to a permanent system instead.
