Denver metro

Westminster's two halves need two kinds of display

Westminster covers 1950s ranch streets on its east side and porch fronted new urbanist blocks on its west, with Standley Lake and open space in between. We deliver uncarved pumpkins and build the autumn display on your porch, designed for the frontage you have.

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A Colorado porch pumpkin display running the length of a front walk near Westminster.

East Westminster ranches and split levels

East of Federal, much of Westminster went up between the fifties and the seventies, and it shows in the housing, with low ranch homes, split levels, brick and siding fronts, carports and shallow entries under a wide eave. These houses give you almost no porch, which sounds like a problem and is not. They give you a long low horizontal line and a proper front lawn, which means we can build across rather than up, running the arrangement along the front of the house and letting the roofline do the framing. Bales matter more here than anywhere else in the city, because they supply the only height in the composition. Mature trees on these blocks also keep the display shaded for most of the day, which extends how long it holds.

Bradburn Village and the porch fronted blocks

West Westminster includes several neighborhoods built to a front porch plan, Bradburn Village being the clearest, where houses sit close to the sidewalk with real porches and the garages are pushed to the alley. That is the easiest kind of house for us and the hardest to overbuild. The porch is small, raised and immediately adjacent to people walking past, so a large arrangement stops reading as a display and starts blocking the door. We keep these tight, work the rail and the step, and let the height of the porch itself carry the display above the sidewalk. Legacy Ridge and the newer streets nearby are the opposite, with wider setbacks and deeper front yards, and they need considerably more volume to register from the road.

Wind off the open west side and Standley Lake

The western edge of Westminster runs into open space around Standley Lake and the Westminster Hills, and there is very little upwind of those neighborhoods. Air comes across the water and the open ground without much to slow it, and the exposure is noticeably worse than in the sheltered older blocks east of the city. We build accordingly on that side, bedding pumpkins into the arrangement rather than setting them on flat concrete, pinning bales and keeping the profile low. Frost also tends to arrive slightly earlier on the exposed western ground than in the built up east, which is not a problem for uncarved fruit. A whole pumpkin takes a freeze without much complaint, and dry cold keeps the skins hard through the last weeks of the season.

Choosing a package for your frontage

The right package in Westminster depends almost entirely on which part of the city you are in. On a Bradburn porch or a townhome stoop, the Little build at $350 usually looks right and a larger one would crowd the entry. On a ranch house with thirty feet of frontage and a deep lawn, that same package would disappear, and the Full is the sensible floor. Legacy Ridge and the larger west side houses often want the top package, because the elevations are tall and the setbacks deep. If you are unsure, send us a photograph of the front of the house taken from the sidewalk, and we will tell you which one fits rather than which one costs more.

Questions from Westminster

What is the Grand Prize Pumpkin and would it work on our stoop?

It is a single very large pumpkin, added for $175, that anchors the whole arrangement. On a deep ranch frontage in east Westminster it works well as a center point on the lawn. On a small Bradburn porch it can take up the entire step, so we would talk it through first.

Do you build through October or only earlier in the season?

We build from mid August to the end of October, and Westminster dates in October do exist, though the calendar is tighter. Building later means a shorter run on the porch, so most people here choose late August or September and keep the display standing for the whole season.

Can you build if we have a xeriscaped front with no lawn?

Yes, and it often works better. Gravel and stone hold a display steady, drain well and keep the bales dry. Plenty of west Westminster front yards are xeriscaped, and we place the arrangement on the harder ground and along the path rather than on planted beds.