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Interior · Adaptive Reuse · 2022

The Vellum Loft

Year
2022
Location
Chicago, Illinois
Scope
Interior · Adaptive Reuse

The building was a working print shop for sixty years before it sat empty for twenty more. Our brief was to convert the top floor into a residence without erasing what the space used to be — the cast-iron columns, the worn maple flooring, the sawtooth skylights that once lit the presses.

We built the new program — kitchen, bedrooms, a study — as freestanding volumes that never touch the original shell, so the industrial bones stay legible from every angle. Where we did add material, we matched it in tone but never in finish, so old and new stay honestly distinct.

It's a loft in the literal sense: one continuous space, organized by light rather than walls.

Original cast-iron columns
Kitchen volume, maple + steel
Sawtooth skylights