Hung with care

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in northern Nevada, thanks in part to a local company that specializes in holiday decorating.

Indeed, crews from Christmas Decor by Signature Landscapes are busy installing commercial building and private residences with customized holiday lighting displays. The business uses energy-efficient LED lights to provide their customers with eco-friendly and cost-efficient displays.

“LED lights take a whole lot less power to run,” said Lebo Newman, the managing partner of Signature Landscapes. “They are really efficient.”

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, LED Christmas lights use 70 percent less energy than traditional bulbs. They are also brighter and safer because they are cooler than incandescent lights.

“While we still offer incandescent lighting to our clients, LEDs for holiday lighting continues to grow in popularity for our holiday decorating installations,” Newman said in a press release. “Our clients want to avoid the high rates they see on their electric bills after the holidays and they also are becoming more environmentally conscious.”

Signature Landscapes was founded in 2001 and provides landscape and outdoor services to the Truckee Meadows, Carson Valley and northern California areas. This is the 12th year that the business has offered holiday light decorating services and it allows the company to use some of their 220 employees to hang decorations during the slow time of year for the landscape industry.

The staff provides clients with professional consultations to help homeowners and businesses design their holiday displays. They offer many different colors of lights to decorate homes, trees and shrubs and they also offer a selection of garlands, wreaths and bows. This year, they are seeing more requests for traditional mixed colored lights. However, the company does not install holiday yard art.

“We don’t do a lot of yard art because we see a lot of vandalism,” Newman said.

The cost to decorate a residential or commercial property varies, but according to Newman, a simple design costs about $750 while an average design costs between $1,100 and $1,200. The bill for larger and more elaborate jobs can go between $5,000 and $7,000. One of the larger businesses Signature Landscapes has decorated this year is the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa.

According to Newman, the business has many repeat clients — many of which add more decorations to their homes each year to outshine what they did the previous year.

By having their homes and businesses professionally decorated, clients do not have to worry about the risk of injuring themselves while hanging their lights. Signature Landscape also dismantles the decorations after the holidays and stores the decorations throughout the year.

The business offered an early bird discount to customers who had their lights hung in late September and early October. Once the lights are installed, the customers can choose when to start illuminating their homes.

“Our clients simply need to ‘flip the switch’ to start the holiday season,” Newman said.

The company is now in the midst of its peak season and will hang lights up through December.

“We will hang lights all the way to Christmas Eve,” Newman said.

Christmas Decor by Signature Landscapes is a franchise of Christmas Decor Inc., which serves more than 40,000 customers across the United States and in Canada.