Outdoor Lighting in Franklin, TN
Gemmell Outdoor Lighting designs and installs custom outdoor lighting for homes across Franklin, Tennessee — including Westhaven, Berry Farms, Fieldstone Farms, historic downtown neighborhoods, and surrounding acreage. Phil and his team have 15 years of experience lighting a wide range of property types. Free design walk. Call (615) 914-4411.
Franklin Asks Two Different Things of a Lighting Designer
Franklin has a strong visual identity and, underneath it, a lighting problem almost nobody solves well. Drive the city and you cross centuries in a few miles: the 19th-century brick of the downtown square, the master-planned order of Westhaven, the wooded lots pushing south toward Thompson Station. A Greek Revival facade and a brand-new Craftsman do not want the same light, the same fixtures, or the same restraint.
Most lighting companies bring one approach to all of it. That is how you end up with a town full of homes that are lit but not designed — and you can spot the difference from the street.
Gemmell Outdoor Lighting works out of Fairview, in Williamson County, and lights homes across Franklin, from the streets off the square to the acreage running south.
Franklin's Neighborhoods Require Different Approaches
Westhaven & Berry Farms
New Traditional architecture — craftsman, farmhouse, and coastal cottage profiles — with HOA design guidelines that require lighting decisions to be considered. Gemmell Outdoor Lighting designs within HOA parameters while achieving results well above the community average. The attached garages, covered porches, and generous street setbacks of Westhaven lots offer excellent architectural lighting opportunities most residents haven't yet explored.
Historic Downtown Franklin
The older residential streets near Franklin's historic center — homes built in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Greek Revival and colonial-influenced styles — call for lighting that respects the architecture rather than imposing on it. That means 2700K warm white, not the blue-white 4000K that turns old brick gray. Narrow-beam fixtures that pick out structural detail. Cast brass and copper, which weather honestly against aged brick and wood instead of chalking the way cheaper finishes do. The best results here are the ones where the lighting looks like it has been there for decades.
Acreage & Equestrian Properties
Rural Franklin properties have long driveways, mature hardwood tree lines, and outbuildings that create genuine design opportunity — and genuine safety requirements. Lighting a long gravel drive is different from lighting a 40-foot paver approach: the spacing, fixture type, and transformer capacity all change. These installs take planning and they take someone who has done them before.
Fieldstone Farms & Newer Communities
Larger estate-sized lots with newer construction — often 2,800–5,000 sq ft homes with three-car garages, formal front entries, and landscaping that was professionally installed but never lit after dark. These properties typically have excellent bones for architectural and landscape lighting: clean lines, established plant beds, and plenty of room for low-voltage runs without trenching under established hardscape.
What Does Franklin's Historic District Require Before You Light a Home?
Inside Franklin's historic overlay, exterior changes that read from the public right-of-way are reviewed by the Historic Zoning Commission, and lighting on a contributing structure can fall under that review. In practice, the question is whether a proposed fixture, mounting location, and color temperature will read as period-appropriate to whoever signs off on a Certificate of Appropriateness.
Gemmell Outdoor Lighting treats that review as part of the design, not a hurdle bolted on afterward. We prepare the submittal the way the commission wants to see it — fixture cut sheets, mounting detail, a warm 2700K color note, and a plan that keeps light on the house rather than spilling toward the street. Where a property sits outside the overlay, the same discipline still applies, because a downtown Franklin block reads as a whole: one over-bright facade throws the rhythm off for everyone. The particulars of any given ordinance are set by the City of Franklin and, on questions of what a jurisdiction permits, we point homeowners to the current Williamson County outdoor lighting rules rather than guess. When approval requires a formal package, a county-level walkthrough of what the review boards expect keeps the timeline honest.
Westhaven and McKay's Mill Reward Restraint, Not Volume
The master-planned side of Franklin has its own design grammar. Westhaven's traditional neighborhood layout puts homes close to the street with deep front porches and shallow yards, which means a single misjudged floodlight is visible to the whole block. McKay's Mill runs to larger lots and more varied elevations, but the community's design guidelines still ask that exterior lighting stay coherent from house to house. The effect these streetscapes are after is continuity — a walkable block that reads as one composition after dark, not a row of independently over-lit facades.
Getting that right is mostly a matter of subtraction. We light the porch ceiling and the entry rather than washing the whole front elevation, keep path fixtures low and shielded so they guide the eye without glaring into a neighbor's window, and hold color temperature warm so the brick and fiber-cement read true instead of going gray-blue. For homeowners who want the roofline lit for the holidays and then again for game days without a ladder every season, permanent roofline lighting in Franklin sits behind a discreet track and switches to plain warm white the other eleven months. When an older Westhaven system starts dropping zones, landscape lighting repair in Franklin is usually a transformer or connection fix rather than a full replacement.
Why Do So Many New Franklin Homes Look Unfinished After Dark?
Franklin builds fast, and the lighting almost always lags the architecture. A new Craftsman or farmhouse arrives with a builder-grade flood over the garage, a couple of coach lanterns flanking the door, and nothing designed for the landscape that a separate crew installed a month later.
The house looks complete in daylight and disappears at night, or worse, that single garage flood glares across the yard and flattens everything it touches.
The gap is real and it is fixable. New plantings are young and sparse, so we stage a design that looks right now and grows into the canopy over the next few seasons rather than over-lighting saplings today. We replace the harsh builder flood with layered, shielded fixtures that give real security without the glare, and we plan runs while the beds are new and easy to trench. Homeowners weighing what any of this costs can start with our Nashville outdoor lighting cost guide, which frames low-voltage and permanent systems in market ranges rather than a mystery quote. Just south, the same builder-handover pattern plays out in Spring Hill, where whole new communities come online at once.
Work in Franklin
New Tennessee portfolio in production — photographed at dusk.
Recent Franklin installations are being photographed the way the work is meant to be seen: on the property, after dark. See the current portfolio.
Services Available in Franklin, TN
Permanent Outdoor Lighting
Roofline fixtures installed once — no seasonal reinstall, no ladders.
ServiceArchitectural Lighting
Facade uplighting designed for Franklin's range of architectural styles.
ServiceGarden & Landscape
Tree uplighting and garden bed accents for Franklin's established landscaping.
ServicePermanent Lighting in Franklin
Track-and-fixture roofline systems sized to your Franklin home and HOA guidelines.
ServiceLighting Repair in Franklin
Any-brand diagnosis, halogen-to-LED conversion, and maintenance for existing systems.
Also serving nearby: Brentwood · Belle Meade · Leipers Fork · Thompson Station · Fairview
Franklin Lighting Questions
Do I need approval to add outdoor lighting to a home in Franklin's historic district?
It can. If your home is a contributing structure inside the historic overlay and the lighting is visible from the public right-of-way, it can fall under Historic Zoning Commission review and may need a Certificate of Appropriateness. Outside the overlay, no formal review typically applies.
Requirements are set by the City of Franklin, so we confirm the current standard before designing and prepare the submittal package for you. Even outside the overlay, the same period-appropriate restraint still produces the best result.
Can you light a brand-new Franklin build before the landscaping fills in?
Yes, and it is often the ideal time. We stage the design so it looks intentional while plantings are young and grows into the canopy as they mature, and we run wiring while the beds are new and easy to trench.
Starting early also lets us replace the builder's glaring garage flood with layered, shielded fixtures from the outset rather than working around it later.