Christmas Light Installation in Soulard

No eave, no problem

Soulard is one of the oldest surviving neighborhoods in the city, and the housing reflects that: nineteenth-century brick rowhouses and flats, built shoulder to shoulder on narrow lots, with flat or low-slope roofs behind a parapet and a small stoop out front. Ask most lighting companies to quote a Soulard house and they will quote roofline they cannot actually install. There is no eave running across the front of a flat-roofed brick row, and pretending otherwise produces either a refusal or a mess.

The narrow lots matter as much as the roofs do. There is often no driveway, no side access and very little room to set a ladder, so the work has to be planned around the street rather than the yard, and scheduled so a crew is not blocking the block for an afternoon.

The design that works here

What these houses do have is strong vertical geometry and good detail at eye level. Window surrounds, the door and its transom, the stoop rail, the iron fence and the small street tree are all within a few feet of the sidewalk, which is where anybody walking past will see them. Lit at one warm temperature, that reads far better than a thin line at roof height that nobody can see from the pavement anyway.

• Door and transom framed, with lit garland where there is somewhere for it to sit
• Window surrounds outlined on the front elevation, evenly spaced floor to floor
• Iron fence, rail and gate wrapped — the single highest-impact item on most of these houses
• Street tree or courtyard tree wrapped clean up the trunk where there is one

Nothing gets drilled into historic brick or original ironwork. We install in October and November, keep it running all season, and take it down and store it in January. Serving Soulard, Lafayette Square and the near south side — (636) 244-6125.