From a Brooklyn inventor to a Newburgh lighting company.

Hudson Valley Lighting is a New York lighting company founded by David Littman, and its story begins a generation earlier. The company’s own history says his grandfather, William Littman, was a Brooklyn-based inventor who was inspired by fluorescent lighting at the 1939 New York World’s Fair; a company article published in November 2025 says the grandfather worked with General Electric on that fluorescent lighting and founded a business called Lightron in Brooklyn.

The family business moved north. By 1947, the company says, it had grown and moved upstate to the Hudson River Valley; its November 2025 article traces Lightron from Brooklyn to Cornwall and then to New Windsor, in Orange County. Business of Home, profiling the company in April 2018, told the same story of a business that started small and moved upstate to expand.

David Littman’s own company came next, and the sources give two dates. The company says he founded Hudson Valley Lighting on 17 October 1985. Business of Home, in Taylor Barker’s 2018 profile, says Littman founded his first lighting company in 1985 and quotes him: “in 1995, I launched HVL.” We give both. The company’s About page says he took over his own business in Newburgh, New York, and that Hudson Valley Lighting stayed in Newburgh for three decades before moving to Wappingers Falls, in Dutchess County, where its headquarters are today. The company’s 2025 article says the Wappingers Falls building was previously used by IBM and by Coca-Cola.

The brand carries the name of the valley the family business moved to in the 1940s, rather than the family’s own name.

From one name to a group of brands.

Hudson Valley Lighting is now one brand inside Hudson Valley Lighting Group, which Littman leads as founder and chief executive. The group grew by acquisition. The company says that in the early 2000s Littman acquired and revitalised three lighting businesses: Corbett Lighting, Troy Lighting and CSL, the last a commercial and residential lighting maker. It added a brand of its own as well: Mitzi, which the company describes as created by Hudson Valley Lighting and which Business of Home dated to 2017.

The group’s longest-running outside connection is Sonneman. Business of Home reported in July 2025 that Hudson Valley Lighting Group had acquired the brand, known for architectural LED lighting, and that Littman would serve as its chief executive. The magazine said Sonneman had been founded in 2003 by Littman, Sonny Park and the lighting designer Robert Sonneman, who had licensed his designs since the 1960s; Littman co-owned it until 2018, when Dunes Point Capital bought it.

The newest member sits outside lighting. On 20 February 2026 the group announced that it had acquired Schoolhouse Electric, the Portland, Oregon, brand known for lighting, textiles and home goods. “We are thrilled to welcome Schoolhouse into the Hudson Valley Lighting Group family,” Littman said in the announcement. The group’s website lists its brands as Hudson Valley Lighting, Troy Lighting, Corbett Lighting, Mitzi, Schoolhouse, Sonneman and CSL.

Design and documentation.

Decorative lighting brands in the United States sit at several different points in the trade. Some began as workshops making fixtures by hand; some are design houses that draw a collection and have it made by factories and artisans elsewhere; some are retailers whose name appears on lamps they commission from others. A single name can be sold through a trade-only showroom, a design-district store, a catalogue and a website at once.

A lighting brand’s identity is usually carried less by one lamp than by a catalogue, a set of finishes, a showroom and the designers whose names appear beside its own. The company behind the name may have changed hands, taken in investors or moved where its fixtures are made since it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its fixtures are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its lamps are made and how it presents itself to the trade — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Designed for the trade, named for a valley.

Like other American lighting houses, Hudson Valley Lighting has turned to interior designers for collections. Business of Home reported in April 2018 that the company unveiled a collaboration with the interior designer Corey Damen Jenkins at High Point Market that year. Littman explained the thinking to the magazine: “Interior designers inspire us creatively as well as drive trends in the market,” he said, calling designers “really at the heart of our business.”

He also gave the magazine a line that serves as a design brief for the brand: “My personal philosophy is that it’s not enough for a product to look good; it has to feel good too.” The company’s current About page describes Hudson Valley Lighting as offering “a wide range of timeless fixtures,” with an emphasis on quality, design and craftsmanship, and tells Littman’s story through his mother’s antiques hunting, from which, it says, he learned about quality and detail.

Contract and custom work sit alongside the catalogue fixtures. In its 2018 profile, Business of Home listed the Littman businesses as Hudson Valley Lighting, Troy Lighting, Corbett Lighting, Mitzi, CSL — which it spelled out as Creative Systems Lighting — Littman Brands Contract Lighting and a Troy Lighting Custom Design Studio.

The group’s brands keep their own identities. The February 2026 Schoolhouse announcement said the brand would keep its own identity while operating under the group, and the group’s website presents each brand separately, with Hudson Valley Lighting as its namesake.

For a design guide, Hudson Valley Lighting shows how a regional name and a family history can carry a brand that has grown into a group of others. Compare Schoolhouse, the Portland brand the group bought in 2026, and Visual Comfort, another American lighting company built around a founder and his designers. For this guide we use river green, aged brass and opal with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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