Landscape Lighting, Greater Nashville
Local Designers, Not a Fixture Franchise
Gemmell Outdoor Lighting is a landscape lighting design company serving Greater Nashville and Williamson County, Tennessee. We design low-voltage systems — uplighting, facade grazing, hardscape and path lighting — around the architecture and planting of one specific property at a time. We install what we design, and we service it afterward. Call (615) 914-4411 for a free design walk.
Most Lighting Companies Treat This as an Add-On
Landscape lighting is usually sold by somebody whose real business is something else. A landscape contractor adding a line item. An electrician wiring whatever he was handed. A seasonal company filling in the off-season. The work shows it: fixtures end up wherever the trench already was, everything burns at one intensity, and nobody ever decided what the property is supposed to look like at night.
We built Gemmell Outdoor Lighting around lighting as the craft instead of the upsell. Phil spent more than a decade in landscape design and construction before specializing in it, which is why a plan here starts from the architecture and the planting and not from a fixture catalog.
What Gemmell Outdoor Lighting sells is the design: low-voltage landscape lighting drawn for one property in Greater Nashville, by the person who then installs it.
Greater Nashville Is Not One Lighting Problem
A 1920s Belle Meade estate, a new Westhaven build and a Leipers Fork property on acreage need three genuinely different systems.
The estate has mature canopy and formal architecture, so it wants uplighting and a light hand. The new build is the opposite case: crisp elevations, planting that has not grown in yet, which means the architecture has to carry the whole design for the first several years and the plan should expect the landscape to catch up. Out on acreage the problem inverts again. There is real dark out there, distance between everything, and a little light travels a very long way. Over-lighting is the failure mode, not under-lighting.
Same people, same fixtures, three plans with almost nothing in common. Which is the whole argument for walking a property before designing for it.
What You Actually Get
A design walk after dark, on your own property, with the person who will draw the system. It is free and it is not a sales visit with a clipboard.
After that: a written scope and a written quote, never a verbal range. Fixtures specified for your architecture and for Middle Tennessee weather: solid brass and copper, not thin aluminum. Installation by the same people who did the walk. And a system we service ourselves, which we can do because we are not a dealer fronting somebody else's product line.
If your property already has lighting that has quit performing, that is a different conversation. It starts as a diagnosis rather than a design, and we do take on repairs to systems other companies installed.
Questions, Answered
What areas around Nashville does Gemmell Outdoor Lighting serve?
Williamson County first: Franklin, Brentwood, Belle Meade, Leipers Fork, Thompson Station, Fairview, Nolensville and Spring Hill. Then Greater Nashville, including Green Hills, Forest Hills, Oak Hill and Hendersonville. The service areas page carries the full list.
What is the difference between landscape lighting and outdoor lighting?
In practice they describe the same work, and homeowners search for both. Landscape lighting leans toward trees, planting beds and garden features. Outdoor lighting is the wider term and takes in the facade, the roofline and the hardscape. We design all of it as one system.
Lighting a garden beautifully and leaving the house it sits against in the dark does not look like a decision anyone made on purpose.
Do you install permanent holiday lighting as well?
Yes. Permanent roofline lighting is a separate architectural system that lives in the eave all year and holds a single warm white for most of it, with color available for the handful of days anyone wants color. Specified properly, you do not see it in daylight.
Is landscape lighting worth it on a newer home?
Yes, if anything more so. On a new build the planting has not grown in, so the architecture is doing all the work and a designed system is what gives the elevation depth and shadow it does not have on its own.
The other reason is practical: size the wiring for the full plan on day one and later phases add on without anyone re-trenching the front yard.