Municipal Holiday Lighting Across the Town Center
The project
This municipal installation brings several lighting elements together across the town center. At Montenegro Square in Ashland, we wrapped the tall evergreen in multicolor lights and arranged illuminated spheres across the lawn to create lower points of light around its base. We carried the display into the pergola with suspended spheres, then finished the surrounding post lights with warm-white garlands and red bows.
The photographs also show coordinated warm-white lighting on nearby civic façades, trees, columns, and rooflines. Together, the tree, spheres, pergola, and streetscape lighting create a connected nighttime presentation that can be viewed from sidewalks, the road, and gathering areas. The mix of multicolor and warm-white elements keeps each feature distinct while maintaining a consistent municipal display across the site.
The challenge
The centerpiece evergreen is far taller than any ladder can reach, so its upper boughs were lit from an extended boom lift, set up in daylight and still in use after dark. The wreaths high on the Town Hall were hung from the lift as well. The rest of the plan spreads across the square, the pergola, a long run of streetscape post lights and two civic buildings with columns, pediments and wide eaves, all of it surrounded by sidewalks, parking and open lawn.
How we lit it
We gave the tree its own color story, with multicolor bulbs carried from the lower boughs to the top and the trunk wrapped in warm white so the base reads as a lit column. Everything else stays in warm white: the garland with 16-inch red velvet bows on 50 streetscape lamp posts, the rooflines and pediments of the library and Town Hall, the spiraled garland on their columns, the gable and door wreaths, and the branch-wrapped trees that flank the Town Hall steps.
On the lawn, warm and cool white spheres, 36 and 24 inches across, sit at the base of the tree, and more spheres hang from the pergola beams at staggered drops, so the display continues at eye level instead of stopping at the tree.
The result
After dark the square reads in layers: the multicolor tree as the focal point, glowing spheres at ground level, and the warm white streetscape and civic buildings tying the town center together. Each season the tree is switched on with a countdown when Santa arrives in town, and the square serves as the backdrop for that gathering. It stays visible from the road, the sidewalks and the public parking area.
