Christmas Light Installation on the Niangua Arm

The longest arm on the lake

The Niangua runs southwest off the main channel and simply keeps going — past Ha Ha Tonka, past Bridal Cave, up into water that narrows and quiets the further you travel. It is the lake’s largest arm by a comfortable margin, and the people who live along it rarely give their address as a town. They give the cove, or the mile marker, or the road they turn off Highway 5.

That is a useful way to think about lighting out here as well. Niangua houses tend to sit on wooded, sloping ground with the water below and the road above, which puts the roofline, the tree line, and the dock at three different elevations. Treated as one composition, it reads beautifully from the water. Treated as three separate jobs, it looks like three separate jobs.

Straight answers for the arm

We’re a long way up the arm. Is that a problem?

No. We route the Niangua in blocks so a crew spends whole days on the arm rather than crossing the lake twice in a morning. The distance changes our schedule, not your price.

The lot is nothing but timber. Is there anything to light?

Usually more than you would expect. Bare winter hardwoods let a single lit gable carry a remarkable distance, and two or three properly wrapped trunks along the drive do more on a wooded lot than another forty feet of roofline ever would.

Is dock lighting worth it this far off the channel?

Arguably more than anywhere. The upper arm holds some of the stillest water on the lake, and still water doubles everything you hang above it.

We only come up on weekends.

So does much of the arm. Photographs and an address are enough for a quote; we install midweek while the place is empty and send a photo the first evening it is lit.

One number, all the way through January

A Niangua quote covers exactly what a lakefront quote covers: the design, commercial-grade lights cut to your house rather than folded to fit it, the installation, care through December if wind takes a section out, then takedown in January and labeled storage until next season. Being well up the arm has never made anybody here a special case.