A great room reveals its lighting plan the moment you walk in, and then never asks you to think about it again. The fixtures are the right ones for the architecture. The lumen levels are correct for the time of day. The color temperature reads warm without going amber. The scenes change the room without flipping the mood. That is the deliverable of a lighting designer who knows what they are doing. Tirschwell & Co. is one of the studios that has been delivering it for more than 25 years.
Who Tirschwell & Co. Is
Tirschwell & Co., also operating as Tirschwell Lighting Design, was founded in 1999 by Matthew Tirschwell and is headquartered in New York City. In 2022 the firm opened a second studio in Beverly Hills at 144 South Beverly Drive, extending the same practice into the Los Angeles market. The studio is a small, focused team built around Matthew’s lighting practice. Matthew is the owner and creative lead and personally shapes the lighting program on the studio’s signature projects.
The firm states its own ethos plainly on its About page: “push the boundaries of lighting design, appreciate failure, treat all people with respect, and have fun.” The portfolio is over 600 completed projects, ranging from small apartments to residences of 15,000, 30,000, 60,000, and up to 100,000 square feet across the United States and the Caribbean, plus hotels and restaurants, workplace lobbies, art galleries the studio returns to year after year to relight new exhibits, and one-off projects such as the selfie room at Hall des Lumieres in Manhattan. The sector mix is roughly 55% residential, 20% commercial, 15% hospitality, 5% galleries, and 5% retail.
The Residential Portfolio
The residential work is where Matthew’s reputation in New York was built and where his name appears most often in the design press. The studio’s NYC residential project list reads as a directory of the architects and interior designers who define modern New York luxury: a Central Park West residence by William Leeds Architect, a Tadao Ando masterpiece on East 72nd Street, Jacques Grange’s interiors at 432 Park, work for Shelton Mindel on a waterfront residence, Billionaires’ Row at Central Park South, a Crosby Street loft by Deborah Berke, a Park Avenue renovation by Douglas Wright with Foley + Cox, a Riverside residence by Victoria Hagen and William D. Earls, and a Cordell Avenue project by Paul McClean in Los Angeles.
Country and resort residential is just as deep. Multiple Peter Marino projects are documented in the portfolio, including a modern home in Sagaponack, a Connecticut Tudor Revival refresh covered by Architectural Digest, a Southampton estate at Meadow, a Rocky Mountain ski retreat at Red Mountain, and additional Peter Marino work in Southampton. The studio has lit Turkel Design’s Mulmur Hills Farm in Ontario (Architectural Record), the Axiom desert house in Palm Springs (a Palm Springs Modernism featured home), East Lake House in Montauk by Robert Young Architects (Architectural Record), Trousdale by Shubin Donaldson in Beverly Hills, a Tennessee farmhouse by Meyer Davis Studio, Telluride work by Constantine Wickenburg, a Riverhouse in upstate New York by BW Architects, and projects in Connecticut and Southampton with Kevin Cahill.
Hospitality, Commercial, and Cultural Work
The hospitality list runs through some of the most recognizable rooms in New York. The studio executed lighting at Sona restaurant (Michael Zenreich with M.A. Bowers, reviewed in The New York Times), Bar Boulud, Del Posto (with Glen & Co.), Hotel Indigo Brooklyn, Third at Bankside in the Bronx (Hill West Architects), the Bowlmor entertainment venues, Taco Guey (CCS Architecture), Kiss ‘n Fly, Earth Nightclub (notable for a 25-foot tall wall of fiber optic candles), and Maxwells. Internationally, the studio designed lighting for the Millenium Atria in Dubai. Cultural work includes St. Sarkis Church in Carrollton, Texas with David Hotson, the project World-Architects named US Building of the Year 2022, and the Church of the Holy Apostle.
Commercial and retail work spans tower lobbies and luxury flagships. The studio executed lighting at One Vanderbilt — both the model room with Gensler and the 54th floor with Vocon — 919 Third Avenue with Studios, 885 Third Avenue with mDeAS, the lobbies at 1350 and 1185 Avenue of the Americas, 461 Fifth Avenue, Derek Lam’s 10 Crosby retail store, the LOT-EK Puma City showcase, the NBC Conference Center with BAM Studios, and Oscar de la Renta’s Los Angeles flagship in 2023. Gallery work for James Cohan, Venus over Manhattan, Levy Gorvy in NYC and Hong Kong, the Brant Foundation in Connecticut, and Perrotin Gallery in New York is documented across the portfolio.
Press, Recognition, and the Designer Beyond Lighting
The studio’s press archive reads like a tour of the design press. Matthew and his projects have appeared in The New York Times (Beneath the Surface: A Peek at Private Pools; At Sona, a Feast; From All Around India), Architectural Digest (Beverly Hills modern home at the top of the hill; the Peter Marino Rocky Mountain ski retreat; the Peter Marino Connecticut Tudor Revival refresh), Architectural Record (Mulmur Hills Farm; East Lake House), Mansion Global, Gotham (Anne Barge and Mulberry NYC store openings), NBC Open House NYC (a feature on Matthew’s NYC lighting design and a 248 Central Park West tour), Interior Design, One Kindesign, Aronson’s Floors, Texas Architect (Reflection and Remembrance), and World-Architects (Texas Church Wins US Building of the Year 2022). Industry talks include the Pratt Design Symposium and the IESNYC New York Section.
Outside of lighting, Matthew is a volunteer EMT with the Ridgewood Volunteer Ambulance Corp and was profiled by Channel 11 news as the “Subway Savior” for saving a life on the New York City subway. SDA Lighting and the Pearl Collective podcast have both interviewed him about COVID-era emergency response and the business of running a small architectural lighting practice. The combination tells you something about how he runs the studio: serious work, but a person on the other end of it who has skin in the game outside of design.
Why Lighting Designer Selection Matters for Control Integration
The reason a studio of Tirschwell’s level matters to our side of the project is that the lighting designer’s drawing set is the document the integrator builds the control system around. The fixture schedule, the zoning plan, the dimming curve specifications, the color temperature decisions, the scene intent, the daylight harvesting strategy, the visual mockup expectations — all of that has to translate into a Crestron, Lutron, Savant, or Ketra program that actually executes the way the designer intended. A control programmer can only deliver what the lighting drawings define. When those drawings are vague, the integrator fills in the gaps, and the result is a system that works but does not look the way the designer imagined.
Lighting designers fall into a few camps from the integrator’s point of view. The first is the designer who treats lighting as a fixture selection exercise. They pick beautiful pendants and sconces and call out a generic dimming requirement. The control programmer is left to invent scene logic and zoning from a finish-plan-style drawing. The second is the designer who specifies zones and scenes but does not coordinate with the controls vendor on hardware constraints. Channel counts go wrong. Load types collide. Phase dimming gets specified for fixtures that need 0-10V or DALI. The third is a small group of designers who understand the control platforms well enough that the lighting drawings can be implemented exactly. Tirschwell & Co. is in that third group. The studio has been working with high-end residential and commercial control systems for the entire 25 years they have been in business and the drawings reflect it.
What That Coordination Looks Like on a Project
When we are working on a residence where Tirschwell has the lighting design, we read their drawing set as a specification document. The fixture cuts identify the exact products with their load characteristics. The dimming notes specify the protocol — phase-cut, 0-10V, DALI, ELV — for each fixture type. The zoning and scene documentation describes what the room should look like at morning, afternoon, evening, and night, with explicit lumen targets where it matters and architectural intent where the numbers are not the point. That gives us a control specification we can program to.
The Crestron lighting and shade programming on a project like this is not an afterthought to the AV system. It is an architectural deliverable. Scenes have to look the way the designer drew them. Color temperature transitions have to be smooth. Daylight integration has to feel natural rather than mechanical. Touch panel interfaces have to expose the right control hierarchy to the homeowner. That is the work, and the only way it ships correctly is if the lighting design document was solid from the start. With Tirschwell’s drawings, it is.
The 600-Project Track Record
Six hundred completed lighting projects across 25 years is the kind of portfolio depth that does not exist by accident. Each of those projects produced an installed system, a punch list, a commissioning checkout, and a relationship with the architect, interior designer, contractor, and electrician on that job. The studio learned what worked and what did not at the scale where lessons compound. Architects who have used them once tend to use them again, which is why the project list reads as multiple Peter Marino projects, multiple Turkel Design projects, multiple Robert Young Architects projects, repeated James Cohan Gallery exhibits, and a long-standing relationship with the gallery and cultural side of the New York design world.
The sector mix — 55% residential, 20% commercial, 15% hospitality, 5% gallery, 5% retail — also tells you something about how the practice operates. The residential majority gives the studio the discretion and creativity that the best residential clients allow, while the commercial, hospitality, and cultural work brings the rigor of large-scale, code-driven, mechanical and electrical coordination. That cross-pollination shows up in the residential output: the rigor of the commercial work without the loss of the design freedom that residential allows.
“On a luxury residence, the lighting designer’s drawings determine whether the control system can actually deliver the room the way the architect intended. We have worked under enough lighting designs to know the difference. Matthew Tirschwell’s drawings are the kind we want to see. The fixture schedule is complete. The dimming protocols are specified correctly. The scene intent is documented. When the drawings are that solid, the Crestron programming can match them. That is the version of this work we want to be doing.” — Michael Restrepo, Founder, Restrepo Innovations
How Restrepo Works With Tirschwell & Co.
On projects where Tirschwell & Co. is the lighting designer of record, our role is to deliver the Crestron and lighting control infrastructure that brings the lighting design to life. That means we read the fixture schedule and dimming specifications, coordinate the control hardware with the electrical drawings, design the structured wiring and network backbone that the lighting control system rides on, install the keypads and touch panels in the locations the designer and architect have specified, and program the scenes and time-of-day automation to match the lighting program. Where motorized shading is part of the design, the same coordination happens with the shade specification. The handoff is a commissioned, documented system the homeowner and the lighting designer can both stand behind.
If you are an architect, interior designer, or homeowner working on a high-end residence and you want a lighting design firm whose drawings will translate cleanly into a Crestron or Lutron control system, Tirschwell & Co. is one of the studios we recommend without hesitation. To discuss a project where Tirschwell is already engaged, or to bring in a lighting designer of that caliber on a residence or commercial space in NJ, CT, or NY, contact Restrepo Innovations. See our broader Partners page for the full network of vetted designers, architects, and trades we work with across the tri-state area.