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INTERVIEW / SUZAN TILLOTSON
ARCHITECT’S CHOICE
Suzan Tillotson confides to Vilma Barr the three “B’s” behind her top-tier list of client architects: Build trust, Believe in the Big Idea, and Break the Rules
“Suzan Tillotson is always brilliant and easy to work with. The lighting at our Southampton house had to be recessive, but there was a lot more to it. I design with twilight in mind, to capture that twinkling, magical time between day and night. Suzan’s the master of the twilight hour.” Alexander Gorlin, Alexander Gorlin Architects, New York
Suzan Tillotson came close to following a career in engineering like her father and brother. Fortunately for Suzan, two icons of the lighting profession, Howard Brandston and Jim Nuckolls, arrived on the scene in time to redirect her ultimate course of study to lighting.
“My father was a civil engineer and we lived all over the world,” recounts Suzan, President of New York City-based Tillotson Design Associates. “With extensive travel, I became very aware of the built environ- ment. During my senior year of high school, we moved to Louisiana.”
“I enrolled in the architecture program at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge,” she indicates. But the first year was boring and tedious to me. I loved math and also took classes in art and graphic design. When Howard Brandston and Jim Nuckolls visited the campus to speak to us about lighting design, their presentation totally sold me on lighting as a viable career. I became fas- cinated and changed my major to interior design so I could take courses in lighting design,” she recounts.
After obtaining her degree, she worked for Levy-Kramer Associates, an engineering firm in Baton Rouge. “I was in charge of all light- ing design for schools, churches, hospitals, parking lots… everything, and worked with the project engineers daily on productivity and liability issues. I could have followed this career path and become an engineer but I enjoy art… I like to paint,” she says. “The natural step for me was to expand my strong interest in lighting design. After five years of working in Louisiana, I decided greater opportunities for creative design existed in New York and I relocated.”
BUILD TRUST
Her association in New York with Brandston, Flack & Kurtz Engineers, and then with lighting designer Jerry Kugler introduced her to problem-solving for complex design criteria. Once she established her own lighting design consultancy in 2004, one of her objectives was to build a practice renowned for its creative approach. “I’ve been fortunate to have working relation- ships built on foundations of mutual trust
with a number of today’s outstanding archi- tects and designers,” Tillotson states. She identifies trust-building as a key element in establishing successful collaborations with the world-class designers who retain her firm’s services. “Architects are aware from the outset that we really care about their project, and they feel comfortable knowing that we thoroughly understand their aes- thetic and performance goals. They trust us to integrate the lighting to give dimension and shape the personality of the finished spaces, whether for architectural or decora- tive purposes,” she explains. “From the initial meeting, there is fluid communication with clients,” Suzan notes. “They are smart people who listen to our advice to make decisions based on both design and technical information including weighing the advantages of new technolo- gies such as LEDs.”
She observes a trend to think small when it comes to specifying products for minimalist designs that offer energy-efficient con- sumption, while still providing appropriate and uniform distribution in tighter packages
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