Launceston City Council

via City Prom

Project Challenges

The most common challenges facing owners of large Christmas trees are:

• The high quantity of decorations needed to achieve a reasonable level of decorative cover
• The traditional styles of decorating Christmas trees with large baubles lack night time impact and most lighting solutions do not have a daytime impact
• Exposure to UV and adverse weather can result in high annual replacement costs if the decorations are not durable enough

We needed to find a decorative solution that would address all of the above challenges.

Custom Christmas decorations using the German made Masson range, a highly flexible, incredibly durable open weave fiberglass. The large 1m stars from this range was chosen, with only 40 needed to decorate the whole tree. The Masson product range is ideal for large outdoor Christmas decorations because it has limited wind resistance due to its open weave format.

Whilst the Masson product can easily be finished in any colour, the see-through open weave of the product, by itself, can lose impact against the dark green foliage of the tree. However, by mounting a silver holographic panel to the back of each Masson star, it resulted in each star reflecting the full-colour spectrum in the shape of a star.

To address the need to have night time impact, the stars were fitted with colour changing IP65 rated RGB strip lighting which would reflect off the holographic backing. All 40 stars were networked with a programmed lighting routine installed to create an ever changing night time show.

The end result has been striking large outdoor Christmas decorations, that have resolved both the day time and night time challenges outlined in the client brief. It provided a durable and long lasting solution within the client’s budget. This solution was also a world first and has been internationally recognised and replicated overseas.