Permanent Christmas lights, Nashville TNInstalled once. Lit every December after that.
Permanent Christmas lights are small LED nodes seated in an aluminum channel, fitted to your roofline once and left there, tucked out of sight from the street. December gets set in an app. The other eleven months the same hardware runs warm white on a timer. We are not a dealer for any one manufacturer, so there is no system here we are paid to push.
Five fields, three of them required. About a minute.
Some people call it permanent holiday lighting. Same hardware, same install. You tell us about your roofline and our licensed, insured installers take it from there, and because we are not a dealer for any one manufacturer we have no stake in which system ends up on your eave. There is no price on this page and no reviews to show you. What we do have is the paperwork.
ADecember. One arc of the year, and the reason most people start looking.
BThe other eleven months. Warm white, dimmed, on a timer, same hardware.
Seasonal lighting is one of these twelve arcs, put up and taken back down every year. The permanent version is the whole ring, and what it does is yours to set.
Licensed, insured installers on every roofline we light
A discreet daytime profile, out of sight from the street
App-controlled, millions of colors, zone by zone
4 named sources, every figure attributed
The spine / Why we can say this
Nearly every company in this field carries one brand. We are not tied to any.
That is the whole reason this page can be useful to you. There is no manufacturer agreement behind it and no product line of ours to move, so nothing written here is riding on whose name ends up on your eave, the cheaper systems included. Sometimes the answer is not a permanent system at all, and the next section is about exactly that.
None of this is a shot at anybody. If you sell one product line, one product line is what you will recommend, and a good deal of the time it really is the right call for the house in front of you. It just is not a comparison, and from the outside you cannot tell which of the two you are getting.
So the shortlist for your house comes out of your house. How the channel mounts on your eave, how deep the section sits under your drip edge, whether your corners get returned or bent.
AA boxed soffit. The channel tucks up underneath and is gone.
BAn open eave, plain fascia. The run goes on the face of the board.
CA gutter hung over the fascia. What is left is the strip above it.
Three edges, three different mounts, and one of them tight. Which one you have is a fact about your house, and it narrows the list before anybody's catalogue gets a say.
Plain talk
What decides what you pay is footage, how many sides you light, and how many controllers the run needs. There is no price anywhere on this site, because none of it can be worked out before somebody has measured your roofline.
The choice / Permanent against seasonal
Permanent lights or a seasonal crew. Here is the honest version.
A seasonal install is a real service and a good one. A crew turns up in November, hangs a strand tuned to your house, takes it down in January and stores it until next year. Nothing about that is a con, and plenty of people should carry on doing exactly that.
What a permanent system changes is the shape of the job rather than the quality of the light. The hardware goes up once, in daylight, in decent weather. After that December is a setting instead of an appointment, and the other eleven months you have warm white on the eaves if you want it.
The friction is what people actually write to us about. Not the lumens. The pile of small annual chores sitting behind them.
ATen seasons. Ten bookings, ten ladders, and the dark in between.
BOne install, then a line that does not stop needing you.
No money in this drawing on purpose. It plots the one thing both sides agree on, which is the shape of the work rather than the price of it.
The ladder in December
Cold, often wet, sometimes iced, usually at eave height or above. This is the one with a real number behind it, and the number is in the paragraph below.
Booking a crew again every year
Finding one, getting on the calendar before it fills, and doing it again next September. A permanent system turns that into a scheduling job you do once.
Clips, gutters and fascia
Seasonal runs mount with clips that come off and go back on annually. A track system is fastened once, into a channel that stays.
The bin in the garage
Strands tangle, degrade, and get replaced every season or two. There is nothing to store when the hardware never comes down.
The part nobody else prints
When the seasonal crew is the better buy
We do not hang seasonal lights and we do not take them down. There is no version of this list where we are quietly pitching you a second product, which is exactly why we can write it. Five cases, and we mean all five. If one of them is you, say so on the form and you will get the same answer back.
You rent, or you are moving inside a couple of years
Permanent hardware is attached to the house and stays with it. Two Decembers is not enough time to get your money back out of it, and a landlord has to approve the modification anyway.
You want lights for Christmas and nothing else
Half the argument for a permanent system is the other eleven months: warm white on the eaves through the year, on a timer. Skip that half and you are paying for capability you have decided not to use.
You want the fat C9 bulb look
A track system is a line of small nodes seated in a channel. It does a lot of things a bulb strand cannot, and it does not look like a strand of C9s. If that silhouette is the thing you love about Christmas, buy the thing you love.
The lowest possible number this year is what matters
A season of professional install and takedown costs a fraction of a permanent system up front. If cash this autumn is the constraint, that is a real answer and not a lesser one.
Putting the lights up is part of Christmas for you
Some people mean it. The ladder, the cold hands, the arguing about the gable. Automating a ritual you actually enjoy is not an upgrade.
The approval / Williamson County
Your association treats this as a modification, not as Christmas decorations.
Most people have this backwards, and it is an easy mistake to make. Nearly every set of community documents carves out an exemption for holiday decorations, and nearly every one of those exemptions was written for temporary decor: the strand that goes up in November and comes down in January. Hardware fastened to your fascia is not that.
A firm that writes on community association law states the distinction plainly. Holiday decoration provisions generally regulate only temporary decor, while permanent lighting almost always requires prior architectural review committee approval.Source 2That is general commentary on how these clauses tend to be drafted rather than Tennessee law, and nothing here is legal advice from them or from us.
So the real question is not whether your Christmas lights need sign-off. It is whether a permanent change to the outside of your house needs sign-off, and around here the answer to that has been yes for years, for paint and shutters and everything else.
AMcKay's Mill. Most requests approved inside about two weeks.
BFieldstone Farms. Thirty days to act, and the hatching is what comes before the clock starts.
Two communities, two clocks, and we have not averaged them. A blended county number would be true of neither street, and yours is the only one that matters to you.
14 days
McKay's MillFranklin / Community Management Associates
Its design review page says most requests are approved inside about two weeks. Submission goes through the management company portal and a plot plan comes with it, from the county deeds office or from your contractor.Source 4
Its form gives the committee 30 days to act, and the wording matters: the clock starts on a complete submittal. An incomplete packet does not start a slow clock, it starts no clock at all.Source 3
The packet / What to actually send
What the committee wants in the envelope.
Requests get sent back for missing paperwork far more often than they get turned down on the merits. Fieldstone Farms is explicit that its thirty days only start on a complete submittal.Source 3 An incomplete packet is not a slow approval. It is no clock at all, and you find that out in week four.
The list below is the set of fields that community actually asks for, plus the two things any committee already regulating exterior lighting will want to see. That is the only verified Williamson County requirement set we hold, so treat it as a floor. Yours may ask for less, or for something we have never seen. Read your own form.
Then take the letter. Fill in the brackets, attach the six things, and send it. You do not need us to do any of this, and you do not need to have hired anybody yet.
Six attachments and a one page cover letter. The committee is reading a stack, and the stack either answers its questions or generates them.
A written description of the modification
What is being installed, where on the house it goes, and how it attaches.
Plans, materials and a color palette
The channel profile, the material, and the finish color matched to your existing trim. A physical swatch beats a paragraph.
A plat or plot plan
Fieldstone Farms asks for one from City of Franklin records. McKay's Mill asks for one from the county deeds office or from your contractor.
Photographs of the lot and the house
The elevations the run will follow, taken from the street, so the committee is looking at the same thing you are.
Product specifications
Mounting method, fixture direction and output. Committees that already regulate exterior lighting tend to regulate it by brightness and color temperature, so have both to hand.
Your dates
A projected start and a projected finish. Fieldstone Farms asks for a start date and expects the work to begin within ten days of it.
Copy this
A sample ARC request letter
Every bracket is something only you can answer, and we have left them all showing rather than filling them with plausible defaults. The one line worth not cutting is the last paragraph: agreeing up front to adjust brightness, aim or scheduling is the concession that costs you nothing and answers the objection committees raise most.
[Your name]
[Property address]
[City, TN, ZIP]
[Phone] | [Email]
[Date]
[Association name] Architectural Review Committee
c/o [Management company]
RE: Request for approval, permanent exterior LED accent lighting
Property: [Address]
Dear Committee Members,
I am requesting approval to install a permanent exterior LED accent
lighting system along the roofline and soffit of my home at the address
above, under [cite the architectural modification section of your own
community documents by number].
System description
Installation: low profile aluminum channel fastened to the soffit and
fascia, seated so the hardware is not visible from the street. Not a
clip mounted strand.
Channel finish: [color matched to existing trim, specify]. A physical
sample is attached.
Light color: warm white at [color temperature] for everyday use,
static and non animated, with color used only during [the holiday
window your documents allow, if they name one].
Direction and output: downward facing and shielded to keep spill off
adjoining property. Output specification attached.
Control: programmable, on a timer, with a nightly shutoff at [time].
Installer: [company, and license or insurance detail if your
documents require it].
Attached
1. Product specification sheet: materials, output, mounting method
2. Finish sample or color match to existing trim
3. Photographs of the elevations the run follows
4. [Plat or plot plan, if your community requires one]
5. Daytime and nighttime photographs of a comparable installation
6. Proposed start date [date], estimated completion [date]
I understand this installation is subject to committee review, and I
agree to comply with any conditions of approval, including adjustments
to brightness, direction or scheduling if a light trespass concern is
raised after installation.
I am happy to attend a meeting or provide anything further the
committee needs.
Sincerely,
[Your name]
The metro / Franklin and Brentwood
South of Nashville, the review comes before the lights.
Most of the permanent lighting interest in this metro sits along one line. Nashville at the top, then Brentwood, then Franklin, all strung down the same interstate. What changes as you move down it is not the houses. It is how much of your neighborhood is governed by an association with an architectural committee, and how much of that committee's process is written down where you can read it.
Where a crew will drive is not the interesting question. On a job this size the trip across the metro settles nothing. Whether your street has a review board, and what that board wants to see, settles quite a lot.
A schematic, not a map, and not a service radius. It is the order of the three places most of this page is about, which is all it claims to be.
Franklin
Franklin is where the paperwork actually exists. Both Williamson County review processes we could read start to finish belong to Franklin communities, and they are not the same process. McKay's Mill routes submissions through its management company portal, wants a plot plan from the county deeds office or from your contractor, and says most requests are approved inside about two weeks.Source 4 Fieldstone Farms uses a paper request form, wants a plat plan pulled from City of Franklin records along with photographs and a color palette, and gives its committee thirty days from a complete submittal.Source 3
Two communities in one city, a fortnight apart on paper and asking for plans from two different offices. That is the argument against looking up a Williamson County answer and assuming it is yours. Pull your own documents.
One caveat we will not paper over. McKay's Mill publishes a signs and decorations policy that would not load for us on 10 September 2026, so what that document says about lighting specifically is unknown to us, and we have not filled the gap with a guess.Source 4
Brentwood
Brentwood sits in the same county, so the same rule of thumb holds: assume a permanent exterior modification needs review, and start by asking rather than by installing.
Past that, we are going to be straight with you about the limits of what we know. We hold no architectural document from any Brentwood association. A handful of Brentwood community names turn up in third-party writeups describing tough architectural review, and we could not trace any of it back to an association's own published documents, so we are not going to repeat it here as though we had. Somebody else's summary of your neighbors' rules is not a source.
The move that works anyway is small. Ask your management company for two things: the architectural modification request form, and whatever section of the guidelines covers exterior lighting. The letter in the section above is written to survive either answer.
Sources, all 4 of them
Every figure on this page is below, with the sentence around it and, where a source undercuts a tidier version of our own argument, that too. Read 10 September 2026.
1U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, holiday safety news release, release date 19 November 2024, quoted in full: "There are about 160 Christmas decorating-related injuries each day during the holiday season, with nearly half of the injuries involving falls. In the 2023 holiday season (Nov. 1, 2022 - Jan. 31, 2023), about 14,900 people were treated in emergency rooms due to holiday decorating-related injuries." Read that window carefully. It runs three months, and CPSC has counted other seasons over two. The counts are not comparable year to year, so nothing on this page draws a line between them or calls the risk rising or falling.
2Mulcahy Law Firm, a Phoenix firm that writes on community association law, on permanent lighting in HOAs, published 31 October 2025. Its finding is the distinction this section rests on: holiday decoration provisions "generally regulate only temporary decor" while "permanent lighting almost always requires prior Architectural Review Committee approval." General legal commentary about how these clauses are written, not Tennessee law, and not legal advice from us or from them.
3Fieldstone Farms, Franklin, Tennessee. Its architectural guidelines and its ACAC request form, both published by Westwood Property Management. The form asks for a description, detailed plans and materials, a color palette, a plat plan from City of Franklin records, and photographs of the lot and the house. On timing it says: "Upon receipt of a complete submittal, the Committee has 30 days to act on this request." The guidelines also call for neutrally colored exterior lighting, spotlights concealed and aimed so the spill stays off the neighbors, fixtures matched to the scale and materials of the house, and prior committee approval for street-visible lighting beyond the porch and eave fixtures. Read September 2026.
4McKay's Mill, Franklin, Tennessee. Its live design review process page, run through Community Management Associates. Submissions go through the owner portal, a plot plan is required from the county deeds office or from your contractor, and the page states: "Most requests receive approval within two weeks." Its own signs and decorations policy would not load for us on 10 September 2026, so we do not know what that document says about lighting specifically and we have not guessed at it.
Start here
The install is a daylight job. The committee is the long pole.
Work backwards from December. Fitting the channel takes a dry day and a crew, and it is not the part that runs out of room. The review is. Around 14 days in one Franklin community, 30 in another, and in both cases the clock only starts once the packet is complete. Add one round of back and forth over a missing plat plan and a month is gone before anybody has been near your roof.
You will not hear us say that slots are filling up, because that is not the constraint and we are not going to invent one. What actually gets tight is the gap between the day you submit and the evening you wanted the house lit.
Licensed, insured installers when you decide to go ahead
Licensed, insured installers. Your name, number and email are used to reach you about this house and nothing more.
ATwo weeks, measured from a complete submittal, in one Franklin community.
BThirty days in another, the same distance up the same street.
CScheduling the work. Hatched, because no honest figure for it exists to publish.
There is no today marker on this drawing. A date printed at build time is right for about a week and quietly wrong for a year after that, so the scale starts on the day you send the request, whenever that is.