The history of our Gate Columns 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 a simple Wrap 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. 

In time, there were amendments to accommodate Landscape lighting, and a series of modified 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 Entry Gate and began a two-year odyssey toward the development of a dedicated Landscape Lighting Fixture as a Column, intended as an architectural feature, scattered throughout a landscape and garden as a form of Landscape Lighting, of course, 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 reached fruition in the Fall of 2005 with a system that would provide consistent light, driven by solar, to a home in the northern lattitudes of Detroit for seven full hours a day.  A huge breakthrough, as this wasn't just illumination, but the level of light intensity was bright enough to read by, to provide Path and Walkway Landscape Lighting with enough illumination to cast a shadow.

But of course nothing is so simple.  Our crystal solar panel, configured in size to seat itself on top of the Landscape Column cap, was manufactured in Argentina.  Have you ever dealt with the Argentineans?  A wonderful culture, but with the business sense of a raccoon.  Having spent time in Buenos Aries, I 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 a Landscape Lighting Design Column that is hard wired.  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. 

Further developments and progress photographs will appear on the site as they are completed, and yet we work on this dalliance with no more interest or concern for schedules or deadlines than the simple passing of time.  Time, in itself, of course, doesn't exist.