Stephen Tilly, Architect specializes in well designed, finely crafted public, institutional, commercial and residential projects.  The firm provides a full scope of services: feasibility and zoning studies, architectural design, interior design and furnishings, site planning, landscape and garden design.  We also participate in large scale planning and urban design projects.  Based in the Hudson Valley, our work is focused on the tri-state region.  The firm’s completed projects and consulting work, however, range from the Northeast to the South and Midwest.

The integration of buildings and landscapes is a central concern.  Our in-house landscape design capability ensures that we work holistically, in concert with our network of consultants.  A related interest is sustainability, from site plan to plumbing specifications.  Stephen Tilly's focus on renewable energy in the 1970's has broadened into a concern for the environmental and public health consequences of development and architectural design decisions.  We and our consultants are able to bring the latest information about energy, environmental and health issues to bear on proposed construction projects during the early design stages.  In our design for the home of a college environmental studies program, we demonstrate a wide array of sustainable approaches to site and construction.  We have designed a new “green” senior community and mixed use structures, and we are greening existing government buildings as we adapt them for new uses.  We see sustainability as good design, not an appliance or a point system.

Our other principal focus is upon preservation and rehabilitation.  We have conducted historic structure and landscape studies, and prepared drawings and specifications for historic properties, working with local, state and Federal agencies.  We merged sustainability and preservation in the concept and execution of the public library for the Village of Irvington, New York.  The firm shaped the political and development process for the recycling of an historic factory and office complex into a mixed use building containing the Village's new public library on the ground floor under 22 units of low income housing.  That project has received numerous honors from organizations such as the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, the Preservation League of New York State, and the American Institute of Architects.

In Dutchess County, plans are underway for the restoration of A.J. Davis’ Swiss Factory Lodge and the revival of three 19th century worker houses and associated landscape at Historic Hudson Valley’s Montgomery Place.  For Westchester County, we are converting an 183 acre northern Westchester farm into an Environmental Resource Center to be shared by the County, the Cornell Cooperative Extension and the Watershed Agricultural Group.  And in Long Island, we are planning the adaptive reuse of an historic agricultural complex at Caumsett State Historic Park.  As consulting architect at the National Trust’s Lyndhurst, Stephen Tilly is guiding the restoration of several structures at that National Historic Landmark.  In addition, Stephen Tilly, Architect is directing the restoration of the Shearith Israel Synagogue in Manhattan, home of the oldest Jewish congregation in the New World. 

The Lower Hudson Conference of Historical Agencies and Museums has given awards to our preservation plan for Draper Park, a National Historic Landmark and historic observatory in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York; for an archive addition to that observatory; and to our Muscoot Farm restoration.  The American Institute of Architects bestowed Community Design Awards for the Draper Park preservation plan and for the rehabilitation of Horace Greeley’s Chappaqua house for the New Castle Historical Society.  We have also won a “Village” preservation award from the Greenwich Village Historical Society for our renovation of a Manhattan printing building into the internationally known Film Forum cinemas.

Our location reflects and shapes our attitude towards our work.  Our setting and our building juxtapose the best of old and new, the best of urban and village scale.  Our own office is a reworking and restoration of a Medieval Revival theater and associated nineteenth century buildings.  The result of our work as developer, architect and general contractor is a 5,000 square foot, mixed use complex including design studio and apartments in the village center.  We see setting, site and building as a unity to be respected, and to be designed in the same gesture.  We have organized our office to maintain a personal, craftsman-like connection throughout the course of design and construction.  We listen carefully to clients; we appreciate traditions but look at each project freshly in its own right; and we stay at the cutting edge of twenty-first-century building technology and design.