August 26, 2026
ArchLIGHT Summit Gets Folded Into Lightovation
Starting in 2027, Dallas Market Center brings commercial and residential lighting audiences together
Dallas Market Center is consolidating its commercial lighting show into its residential one. ArchLIGHT Summit will hold what stands as its final standalone edition September 15-16, 2026, in Dallas, before moving into Lightovation in June 2027, overlapping the first two days of what remains a longer residential event. The two shows have shared an owner for years. Now they will share a floor.
The move follows a familiar pattern. Earlier this year, AVIXA folded the residential-focused Lightapalooza into InfoComm, pulling a design-driven, relationship-based lighting event into a commercial AV show built around scale and specification. Dallas Market Center is working the equation in reverse, pulling its commercial show toward the residential side of the business. Either direction, the underlying story is the same: the line between brands that serve specifiers and brands that serve showrooms keeps getting harder to draw.
A Shared Roof, Not a New Idea
For manufacturers, the overlap will feel less like a leap than a formality. WAC Lighting, Hudson Valley Lighting Group, Eurofase, and Dals already maintain a showroom presence at Dallas Market Center, alongside other brands whose catalogs span both commercial and residential specification. ArchLIGHT's exhibitor list for its September edition currently shows 83 manufacturers, some of whom could look equally at home on either show floor.
Above: Christian DuFour demonstrates products to attendees in the Dals showroom at Dallas Market Center. Photo: Dallas Market Center
ArchLIGHT built its identity around commercial specifiers and the rep agencies that court them. Its 2025 edition marked the first time the two biggest market-share lighting reps in North Texas, Architectural Lighting Alliance (ALA) and Texas Lighting, both partnered with the event. Acuity, present that year, will not be part of the September show. Current’s rep, Bell & McCoy Lighting and Controls, is sitting this one out too, as it typically does, having just run its own LightX trade show event in Grapevine, Texas in late July.
More Floors, Not Just More Days
The mechanics of that overlap are physical, not just conceptual. When ArchLIGHT runs on its own, it fills the ground floor of Dallas Market Center, the stretch from the koi pond to the Starbucks, while a handful of showrooms upstairs stay open alongside it. Commercial specifiers mostly stay put on that first floor, occasionally venturing up.
Combined with Lightovation, that boundary opens both ways. Residential buyers gain a reason to walk the ground floor they'd normally skip. Commercial specifiers, who might have ventured to a couple of upstairs showrooms before, now have a fuller building to work with while they're already in town.
For lighting people, the ArchLIGHT-Lightovation merger and the Lightapalooza-InfoComm deal are variations on the same bet: that residential and commercial audiences are close enough in practice that separate events cost more than they're worth. Come June 2027, the real test will simply be whether the reps and specifiers who built ArchLIGHT's commercial identity carry it with them onto the new floor.
