FAQ

CPW's Gallery of Architectural Wood Column, Garden Column, and Gate Post Wraps are also sources of Low Voltage Landscape Lighting.

Wood Columns

Post Wrap


Outdoor Landscape Lighting
Low Voltage Landscape Lighting


The CPW Architecural Column as an Innovative Landscape Lighting Design as well as a Gate Post Wrap.

The history of our Wood Column goes back several years. Originating as a need to provide a more presentable feature for those drive gates utilizing steel posts, we developed a 'Post Wrap', based upon the same principles of wood expansion and joined stiles and rails as the gates themselves. Understanding that the common Gate Wraps will almost always result in checking, cupping, and certainly the joints of four sides themselves seeing some separation, the first generation on the CPW Gate Column was born, alleviating all these issues within the existing genre.

In time, there were amendments to accommodate Low Voltage Landscape Lighting that might be considered a form of Bollard Lighting, adding a series of design layouts with the various picket patterns to provide grids, as well a solid panel field.

At some juncture we broke from these Columns as merely Post Wraps flanking the Gate and began a two-year odyssey toward the development of a dedicated Landscape Lighting Fixture, but as an Architecural Column that is better described as a Garden Column also acted as soft lighting. --while providing as well the aesthetics of a work of art. Our delay in this development came about as an attempt to break through the long-standing barrier of Solar Landscape Lighting. Two years of tests and endless prototypes, experimenting with various models of solar panels, LED bulb configurations, and battery life, we have been unable to reach a full night's worth of light on a solar panel anything smaller than a footbal field. or so it seemed.

But of course nothing is so simple. Our crystal solar panel, configured in size to seat itself on top of the Wood Column cap, was manufactured in Argentina. Have you ever dealt with the Argentineans? A wonderful culture, and one of Charles' favorite places, but with the business sense of a raccoon. Having spent time in Buenos Aries, Charles understood the nature of their priorities, the hierarchies of their priorities, and after several months of competing with the German government for what solar panels were available, we simply gave up on this development, on the two years of research, and returned once again to the concept of an Outdoor Column with hard wired lighting. So there are shallow trenches to the Column, required for low-voltage wiring, but in return there is a brighter illuminosity.

We will return to the Solar complexities soon, and with their resolutions, hopefully offer a wireless model.

Meanwhile . . . continuing it one step further, we began work on a large artful structure that had the Public Lighting Columns themselves at ten feet height, linked by a primary panel of grids patterned to a vanishing perspective, featured with a splay of plexiglas inserts to accentuate this perspective. To each side of the primary Public Landscape Lighting Columns a pair of secondary panels, arching down in a confusing escher-like perspective that culminates at the two outer secondary columns. This work is currently, as of this writing, an in-progress pastime designed ultimately for the municipal market and the accentuated place among revitalized city planning efforts.


Exterior Columns

8 0 0 . 4 6 6 . 1 8 5 0 (PST)
7 0 7 . 8 2 3 . 3 7 1 1 (PST)
7 0 7- 6 2 3 - 1 5 4 5 (FAX)

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