Light that vanishes when it’s off

Skyhouse is a penthouse pied-à-terre in New York by David Hotson Architect, with interiors by Ghislaine Viñas and lighting by Tillotson Design Associates¹. Its all-white rooms pull in daylight, with pops of colour in the furniture and art¹.

The brief for the lighting was that it had to look seamless during the day as well as at night¹. So the ambient light comes from backlit LED troughs with white glass fronts, placed around the apartment. When they are off, they disappear into the walls and ceilings¹.

Good lighting isn’t always about adding more light fixtures or making spaces brighter; it’s about designing lighting that is intentional and purposeful.

Tillotson Design Associates

Even the ceiling does two jobs. Dark reveals barely two inches wide conceal the air-conditioning, the studio says, so nothing interrupts the white planes¹.

From the project

The press the studio lists for the project gives a sense of the apartment’s scale and character: one headline calls it ‘the NYC penthouse with an 80-foot slide’¹.

Tillotson’s approach here is the domestic version of this issue’s idea. The light is neighbourly to the architecture: you notice the rooms, the colour and the view, not the fittings.