For first-time visitors, an ornamental wayfinding sign is the handshake from your neighborhood. Attractive, stately, and durable, they welcome visitors with a spirit of helpfulness and warmth. They boast about the great things your community has to offer (Pool! Clubhouse! School! Golf! Parks!). They demonstrate a commitment to detail, cohesiveness, and class. And they help drivers get where they’re going more efficiently (which means safer, less congested streets for your kids).

Perhaps most importantly—now that the summer home-buying season is heating up and plenty of prospective home-buyers are dropping by—they help your neighborhood stand out from surrounding communities. A full palette of possible shapes and sizes are available. And we’ll work with you to find the right custom logo that fits the signs and successfully ties the neighborhood together with a common brand.

But beyond your neighborhood’s streets, our custom logo wayfinding signs can be useful for a host of other purposes, including:

• Navigating golf courses
• Keeping kids from getting lost on neighborhood trails and sidewalks
• Organizing parking at business centers and entertainment centers
• Cheerfully displaying rules, regulations, and community information
• Highlighting community perks (pools, community centers, tennis courts)
• Adding a sense of cohesiveness across the community

Similarly, in addition to wayfinding signs, the rest of our line of custom logo signs also come in a variety of shapes, colors, and sizes — each constructed from the highest quality of materials. These signs include:

• HDPE (high-density polyethylene) signs
• 18×24 ACP (aluminum composite panel) signs
• 22×30 ACP signs
• Custom aluminum street signs

In other words, we offer just about every type of streetscape sign your neighborhood could possibly need.

Long days, warm nights, and big parties — summer is coming. At Brandon Industries, we can help your neighborhood prepare. Here are just a few possible streetscape solutions you might want to start thinking about before the summer months arrive:

Schools Out: Time to Play

Kids will soon be out of school, and the last thing you’ll want is for them to spend the summer cooped up around a video game system. But for the kids to have a summer full of healthy, memorable days climbing trees, playing sports, and running around outside, safety must take top priority.

The most obvious safety threat is traffic, because drivers won’t always be driving as carefully and cautiously as they could be. In other words, you want people to drive through your neighborhood expecting kids to be chasing a soccer ball out into the street from time to time.

We can help you build a signage system that encourages safe driving, both through a full catalog of regulatory and traffic signs, custom signs (“Caution: Kids Playing”), and extra efforts like radar driver feedback signs.

Warm Nights, Fun Under the Lights

Days are (finally) stretching long past dinner time, and nighttime temps are approaching the summery balm we all know and love. Especially once daytime temps approach unbearable, folks are going to start spending more and more time outdoors at night.

Effective outdoor lighting— along walkways and around public areas, as well as streets—is critical to keeping things safe and fostering a sense of community by encouraging people to gather and play. And you don’t need to sacrifice aesthetic quality to do all this—our attractive luminaires and courtyard lamps are stately, elegant, tasteful, and cohesive.

Time to Party

Summer is the season of carnivals, festivals, farmers markets, golf outings, outdoor concerts, garage sales, and all around outdoor merriment. In other words, it’s the time when many communities hold big parties and events partially designed to invite in friends and neighbors from other parts of the city.

This means regular bursts of first-time visitors will be coming to your neighborhood, which means two things:

• An effective network of custom wayfinding signs is key to getting folks where they’re going quickly and easily, minimizing traffic and keeping the streets safe for your kids.
• Attractive, comprehensive streetscape solutions and touches like decorative mailboxes and custom logo signs that impress visitors, highlight your community’s commitment to detail and excellence, and solidify your neighborhood’s reputation as a desirable one (which will eventually be reflected in higher home values).

We provide communities with the choice of seven different decorative mailbox designs. Each stately. Each durable. Each featuring intricate, modern designs that evoke the casting methods of yesteryear.

And each of these designs do far more than collect your mail. They make subtle, but important statements about your community:

“We Care About Community”

Let’s think, for a second, about just what it is that house hunters crave in a community when looking for a new home: Charm. Community. Safety. Stable real estate values.

Obviously, custom mailboxes won’t achieve any of these factors on their own. But they do make up an important part of a neighborhood’s streetscape. And a uniform aesthetic helps bolster a cohesive community atmosphere, and it shows potential homeowners shopping in your area that your community is a robust, tight-knit one that looks out for each other.

Plus, with seven distinct designs available—in addition to a range of corresponding pole widths from 2 3/8 inches to 5 inches—homeowners can still choose which decorative mailbox best fits their home, without deviating too far from the desired neighborhood feel. Many are also offered with dual mounts, which makes it easy to create a unified look with neighbors.

“We Care About the Details”

In any neighborhood, it’s the details that really improve quality of life.

A custom decorative mailbox can give your home and collective streetscape one of the “finishing touches” that tell visitors and home shoppers that the little details matter. Any old box can probably collect your mail without problems, but your community cares about more than just simple utility. It wants to impress, to welcome, to be proud, and to stand out from surrounding neighborhoods.

For an example of the diversity of detail produced by our casts, check out our M1 “The Estate” mailbox model – an elegant, antique reproduction model that, depending on the finials and front mounts your choose, can be both dressed up or kept simple. A good example of our more traditional looks is M9 “The Estate” mailbox model.

“We Care About Quality”

At Brandon Industries, the decorative mailboxes we sell blend the aesthetics of yesteryear with the construction techniques, materials, and quality of today. Specifically, this means construction from either premium steel or heavy-duty cast aluminum (which we love because it’s lightweight, sturdy, and recyclable). A durable powder coat finish is added to prevent rust.

For your community, high-end, long-lasting pieces of your streetscape demonstrate a commitment to quality that goes far beyond streetscapes. Quality matters in home and community center construction, in infrastructure design, and in neighbor-to-neighbor relationships.

Contact our streetscape experts – we’ll help you get the comprehensive streetscape your community needs.

Our streetscape products won’t de-ice the Dallas streets, or say, keep an avalanche of snow from falling off Cowboys Stadium. But the street lights, street signs, and outdoor streetscapes we provide can help communities survive the cold just a little bit more easily.

The reason is fundamental—you can’t dictate the weather or stop chaos from pouring down from above. But with proper planning and preparation, you can bottle up that chaos, and make it manageable.

In other words, on normal, mild-weather, low-traffic days, any old streetscape, street sign, and outdoor lighting system will probably get the job done. But when things go wrong—from, say, a storm or power outage or traffic jam—an effective, intuitive, reliable system that stands strong and tall amidst the chaos can make all the difference in the world.

Plan in advance for those days with our streetscapes, and you’ll have a reliable structure that will keep chaos in its place.

Here’s what we mean:

Reliability:

An effective system of outdoor street lights makes it easier to see dangers like ice patches and flooded dips in the road — assuming the lights are still  shining when chaos swirls.

At Brandon Industries, we use durable, high-quality aluminum to build most of our products (and a durable powder coat finish for extra strength and protection), and use long-lasting HID lighting in our street lamps. This means outdoor lamps won’t come tumbling down in a big storm, and lights will simply last longer than the industry average, making a burnout less likely to happen at the worst possible time.

Structure:

Our custom, decorative street signs won’t make driving on icy roads any easier. But a series of smart, catchy, effective wayfinding signs actually minimize traffic by making it easier for people to get where they’re going. The last thing you need in a storm is a bunch of visitors getting lost and sliding around your neighborhood. Furthermore, a catchy, visible stop sign that actually stops drivers is generally a smart idea in conditions where braking isn’t easy.

Every little bit helps, and confident drivers are safe drivers—especially when conditions are hazardous.

For health, wealth, and community growth, walkability matters. At least, that is, according to The Atlantic, who recently collated a flurry of studies and city rankings about the effects of pedestrian-friendly communities.

“The popularity of sprawling auto-dependent suburbs is waning. A majority of Americans–six in 10–say they would prefer to live in walkable neighborhoods, in both cities and suburbs, if they could. [...]  Christopher Leinberger has shown the positive effects of walkability in cities, towns, and suburbs; the architects Ellen Dunham Jones and June Williamson have detailed ways that older car-oriented suburbs can be retrofitted into more people-friendly, mixed-use, walkable communities. And walkability pays. According to research by Joe Cortright, housing prices have held up better in more walkable communities.”

According to the magazine, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Philadelphia earned the top spots as America’s most walkable cities. Texas cities like Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, on the other hand, didn’t do quite as well.

Now, obviously, more densely urbanized cities like New York and San Francisco will have higher walk scores due to increased need to invest in pedestrian-friendly infrastructure than more sprawling, car-necessary cities like Dallas and Houston. But as many recent mixed-use developments in the Dallas area have shown, low city-wide scores don’t prevent individual neighborhoods—whether urban, suburban, or rural—from developing the safe, inviting pedestrian-friendly environments that homebuyers crave. Suburban-heavy cities with high walk scores like Denver, Portland, Los Angeles prove it.

And in either environment, effective signage systems matters. If your community is in an urban environment, parking difficulties, heavy traffic, and increased access to public transportation will make walking much more of a convenience and necessity—and those same contributing factors make accidents more likely as well. For suburban or rural neighborhoods, folks usually need to walk further to get where they’re going, traffic tends to move at higher speeds, and there’s less lighting from dense city blocks—all challenges that can be helped by a well-designed signage system and (at night) network of attractive, coordinated street lights.

Walkable communities tend to have healthy kids and community-oriented populations—a combination reflected in the home values of pedestrian-friendly developments. From another study we quoted a few months ago:

“More than just a pleasant amenity, the walkability of cities translates directly into increases in home values. Homes located in more walkable neighborhoods—those with a mix of common daily shopping and social destinations within a short distance—command a price premium over otherwise similar homes in less walkable areas. Houses with the above- average levels of walkability command a premium of about $4,000 to $34,000 over houses with just average levels of walkability in the typical metropolitan areas studied.”

So here’s the bottom line:

Street signs and outdoor lighting systems keep pedestrians safe and healthy. Pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods relish from higher home values. Our streetscapes, street signs and outdoor lighting systems can make it all happen—no matter where in the city your community is located.

We’d love to help make your community pedestrian-friendly. Contact our Dallas streetscape and street signs experts for more information.

• Traffic Decongestant

If drivers can get where they’re going more quickly, and not spend even that extra few minutes circling around like vultures looking for an optimal parking spot, traffic congestion will clear up considerably. And fewer cars crawling around means less risk of a safety incident—whether in a shopping center, a downtown culture and entertainment district, a business park, or a neighborhood full of kids

Furthermore, if a customer’s first memory about a particular shopping center is how hurried and harried they were after having to fight through the crowds of cars, they’ll be much less likely to return in the future. A more pleasant and satisfactory overall experience will plant a positive memory in shoppers’ minds, making them more eager to come back and browse.

• Business Booster

Shoppers usually come to a center with one specific store in mind. But one great advantage of clumping a bunch of stores together is the ability to tap into that “impulse buy” (or at least “impulse browse”) factor. Even if customers look to wayfinding signs primarily to, well, find their way to where they originally planned to go, attractive wayfinding signs can be used as subtle advertisements for the other stores in a complex.

• Community Creator

What do a book store, a hair salon, and a Thai restaurant really have in common? A system of attractive, coherent wayfinding signs takes a disparate collection of locations and unites them beneath a cohesive sense of place.
A group of pet stores, sandwich stops, and bridal boutiques suddenly becomes a shopping center. Two museums, and urban park, and a row of cafes, art galleries and nightclubs become an “entertainment district.” A street full of random buildings that have been around since the first Roosevelt administration becomes a “historic byway.” These sorts of communities tend to invite shoppers and visitors to come and explore (rather than just head to one specific location), benefiting everyone there.

At Brandon Industries, we offer a full catalog of stately, effective wayfinding signs. Contact one our Dallas streetscape experts for more information.

Those long walks around the neighborhood are good for the mind, good for body… and apparently good for your house’s bottom line.

At least that’s what’s been reported in a recent study done by city-planning thinktank CEOs for Cities, which measured the correlation between home values and “walkability” in various neighborhoods.

The study looked at more than 90,000 recent home sales from 15 different metropolitan areas, and gave each a “Walk Score”—how many destinations like work, schools, parks, services, and shopping are located within a short distance of that home, and how much families valued that access. In 13 of the 15 cities, the study found, increases in home sale prices could be directly connected to each neighborhood’s pedestrian friendliness.

The results are illuminating:

“More than just a pleasant amenity, the walkability of cities translates directly into increases in home values. Homes located in more walkable neighborhoods—those with a mix of common daily shopping and social destinations within a short distance—command a price premium over otherwise similar homes in less walkable areas. Houses with the above- average levels of walkability command a premium of about $4,000 to $34,000 over houses with just average levels of walkability in the typical metropolitan areas studied.

[...] After controlling for all of these other factors that are known to influence housing value, our study showed a positive correlation between walkability and housing prices in 13 of the 15 housing markets we studied. In the typical market, an additional one point increase in Walk Score was associated with between a $700 and $3,000 increase in home values.”

The added value makes sense. Walkable neighborhoods tend to have a more healthy, vibrant, interconnected community feel. Safety breeds trust. Trust breeds relationships. Relationships breed a sense of place and community, create memories, and boost the attachment families have to their neighborhoods. All this, of course, also boosts home values across the board.

To achieve this, streetscape elements like street signage and attractive street lighting are key. Our products minimize vehicle traffic by getting drivers where they need to go more efficiently (and safely), and make walkable paths and spaces more inviting and easier to locate for pedestrians. At Brandon Industries, we make it easy for families to get out, get fit, and get friendly.

Contact our Streetscape Experts for more information about how to boost your community’s Walk Score.

Chapel Hill McKinney, Texas Streetscape Project

Beautiful, master-planned communities are popping up all over North Texas, and McKinney’s Chapel Hill community shows as well as any other why proper planning and excellent execution can create the type of robust community that families crave. Just 35 miles north of Downtown Dallas, Chapel Hill boasts the feel of an intimate small-town neighborhood within walking distance of McKinney’s Historic District and Towne Lake and Park.

The private enclave consists of an array of architecturally notable, custom-made homes, all surrounded by woods, parks, and trails. Three dazzling parks add an amphitheatre for concerts and community gatherings, a promenade along a lush dry creek bed bursting with nature, and a greenbelt along a 14-acre urban stream. Several of the park trails lead to world-class shopping in a small-town setting, including the Historic District that features more than 100 retail shops and local cafes, spas, and wine cellars.

Many of the homes also feature front porches—part of a successful effort to stimulate civic interaction. The result of all of this is a vibrant, outward-focused community.

Brandon Industries streetscape products goal in a place like Chapel Hill is to help boost that sense of community with custom-made decorative street signs, and ensure a safe, pedestrian-friendly environment that ensures accessibility to the neighborhood’s myriad of outdoor activities.

What we installed:

Decorative Street Signs: The decorative street signs are catchy and pleasing to the eye, which achieves the dual purposes of adding a dash of class to the neighborhood’s streetscapes, while also standing out from the surroundings to do their jobs effectively.

Custom-Made Signs: Custom-made signs provide an element of uniqueness to a neighborhood, which helps forge a community identity.

3” and 4” Fluted Sign Posts: These posts are strong, sturdy, and elegant, and will last as long as the neighborhood opts to keep their current streetscape. The fluted form adds just one more noticeable touch of detail.

Coordinating Sign Bases & Finials: The coordinating bases and finials make a strong statement that an attention to detail matters in Chapel Hill.

Check out more pictures of our streetscape design project at Chapel Hill in McKinney, Texas.

Eldorado Homeowners Association in McKinney, Texas Streetscape Project

Just 35 miles north of Downtown Dallas in the burgeoning suburb of McKinney, we worked with the Eldorado Homeowners Association to install an attractive, effective, and safety-oriented signage system into the Eldorado of McKinney community, as part of the association’s “Phase II” effort aimed to boost community value and livability.

The 20-year-old development features more than 700 homes divided into five distinct subdivisions, creating a rich, diverse community of flourishing families where safety and a common “community feel” are important. There are also ponds and parks, and it’s all built around a world-class golf course and country club, ensuring an active, outdoors-oriented lifestyle for many of the neighborhoods’ families. The golf, local schools, and a adjacent business park each invite regular infusions of first-time visitors, making effective streetscapes critical for both pedestrian safety concerns and ease of access for drivers.

At Brandon Industries, our goal with a neighborhood like this is to install a cohesive, professional streetscape design that both ensured safety and navigability around the different communities, while adding a touch of class via decorative bases and custom signs featuring the community’s logo.

What we installed:

4” Fluted Sign Posts: Stately, strong and durable. These posts will stand proud for as long as a community decides to keep a current signage system.

Sign Trims: These attractive sign trims highlight an attention to detail, and add a touch of class. Even the smallest touches can help signs stand out from the background and do their jobs well.

Logo Trims: The custom logo trims fosters a sense of cohesiveness throughout Eldorado’s five different neighborhoods. It adds to the unique “sense of place” present in Eldorado, and helps establish a united community spirit.

Logo Finial: Similarly, the logo finials also create a sense of continuity and place.

Decorative Street Sign Bases: These bases highlight an attention to detail that shows visitors a standard of excellence and commitment to the community.

Check out more pictures of our streetscape design project at Eldorado Homeowners Association in McKinney, Texas.

Parkwood Blvd. Streetscape Design

Just 25 miles north of Downtown Dallas, we’ve helped a create a safe, professional working environment at the Parkwood Blvd. Office Complex in Frisco.

The complex features two one-story buildings built in 2001, that together provide more than 100,000 square feet of office space. Located between the North Dallas Tollway and Preston Road north of 121, about 25 minutes away from Dallas/Fort Worth Internarional Airport, the large majority of those working at or visiting the Parkwood Office Complex arrive via automobile, which places a premium on excellent and effect signage systems. Building signage is provided for each tenant.

Furthermore, the complex also features six-lane treelined boulevards (Frisco has earned “Tree City USA” honors in the past from the National Arbor Day Foundation), bermed right-of-ways, and walking paths, which simultaneously combine a pedestrian-friendly area with a large presence of daily traffic. Our traffic signs (mounted on 3-inch fluted poles with acorn finials) both ensure safety and mitigate parking and navigational issues.

Use of the complex often stretches deep into the night. Our ornamental wall lights and commercial lamp posts create a safe and welcoming atmosphere at all hours, with a touch of class and elegance—the marks of a thoughtful, effective, and well-designed lighting infrastructure.

What We Installed:

Commercial Lamp Posts—These lamp posts are strong, tall and stately, and create a welcoming atmosphere after dark at the office complex. They provide light for both auto and pedestrian traffic, keeping both visitors and employees safe and secure for as long as they need to stay after working hours. The ornate posts create a sense of commitment to detail and cohesion in the complex.

Wall Lights—These lights add a touch of elegance and consistency. The lights complete an effective lighting infrastructure, ultimately boosting the values of the businesses working in the complex.

Traffic Signs mounted on 3” Fluted Poles—These poles create a working environment that’s safe for both drivers and pedestrians. The overall effective signage system cuts down on wasted time looking for parking or the right offices.

Acorn Finials—The ornate finials highlight an attention to detail and professionalism.

Check out more pictures of our streetscape design project at Parkwood Blvd. Office Complex in Frisco, Texas.