Built in 1925 to house the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company, this fantastic red-brick building is currently home to Cucina Toscana, an Italian restaurant on the main floor and two living spaces above. It’s a prime spot, to put it lightly: the lucky owners are hovering above Pioneer Park on the corner of 300 south and 300 West. These two homes encompass the perfect way to live downtown without sacrificing outdoor space.

The designers started stripping away much of what the last tenant had installed in order to reveal all the raw and simple beauty of the space’s original form. From there, they started carefully adding layers back on that worked harmoniously with the industrial vibe. The magic lays in the richness, created with specific materials. Aged, natural, cherry-finished cabinets in the kitchen, dark colors, black painted metalwork: it’s all delightfully juxtaposed by bright white walls and massive windows that allow for copious amounts of natural light throughout the space.

A smart move in retaining this building’s old charm was by keeping the brickwork exposed. The brick walls offer a new look while preserving the history and the original character of the edifice.

The master bath is a dish of gothic industrial: a metal/chain chandelier over a custom, matte-black-enameled tub that’s perched opposite the ebony-stained cabinets. The walls are lined with 48” wood tile planks, which add a lot of texture and a touch more drama. The designers managed to add an organic element to an otherwise very hard and raw space with the grass-cloth wallpaper, and to accentuate the high ceilings, we hung 72” pendants from the ceiling over each nightstand. But the highlight is that double-sided fireplace (so you can take your romance in the bedroom and the living room).

This a phenomenal space. It’s a converted commercial space with 18 foot ceilings with an industrial feel at roomy 2550 square feet. It’s a very open floor plan with two bathrooms. It’s furnished with vintage furniture and art.

The kitchen is commercial grade with a six burner Imperial Stove and Viking Hood. I have everything you might need to cook up a storm. There is a barbecue and Traeger pellet stove if you want to cook outdoors.

One bedroom is upstairs with a king bed. The bathroom upstairs has a large steam shower that sits at least two if you want to get cozy. The bedroom downstairs has a queen bed. The bathroom downstairs has a massive concrete tub and shower that fits a small village.

The team at Sadie Snelson Architects envisioned an open-plan living room to accentuate the full potential of the warehouse’s space. Dividing walls were removed and parts of the floor were taken away to create double-height areas that maximise light. A new mezzanine floor was added with a steel balustrade and folded steel staircase.

Materials used throughout the property are intended to complement its industrial nature. Walls are left unpainted to expose the plaster finish, and structural I-beams are left exposed. The architects designed the concrete kitchen that the client cast himself. 

Architect:  Sadie Architects
Photos:  Rory Gardiner

Mister Martin, a skilled banjo player and pianist, a semi-retired actor with four dozen films under his belt, a screenwriter, occasional playwright and the author of a slew of books, purchased the two parcels that comprise the estate’s 5.86 rolling acres and the arrestingly unconventional Roland Coate Jr.-designed residence that crowns its most prominent hilltop in early 1995 for an unknown amount.

A gated drive makes a sweeping, serpentine path under dense canopies of mature specimen trees up to a pancake flat blacktopped motor court that isn’t quite but might as well be the roof of the muscular and decidedly bunker-like residence. Current listing details and other online resources show the partially subterranean dwelling was built entirely — we’re talking floors, walls and ceilings — of poured concrete in 1974, with four generously proportioned bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms in the 7,377-square-foot main house plus two more bedrooms and a bathroom in an also bunker-like detached guesthouse.

Exposed and unadorned poured concrete walls, ceilings, pillars and pony walls in the ample living and dining rooms are slightly if monochromatically softened with concrete-colored wall-to-wall carpeting, while both public and private spaces are enlivened with puffy, multicolored sofas, chairs and poufs, elevated by a collection of impressive artworks, provided a soupçon of earthiness with natural wood furnishings and, ultimately, relieved of some of the industrial intensity by cinematic expanses of glass panels and steel-framed French doors that provide both intimate views of the property and magnanimous sunset vistas that sweep over the Pacific all the way to the all-but-unspoiled Channel Islands.

Red brick terraces add a shock of color under foot, and step down the hillside to a partially shaded lounging terrace that forms a peninsula in the bullet-shaped swimming pool that’s wonderfully flush with the simple, grassy landscape that rings it but does not, this property gossip is pleased to report, flood the car with the unnecessary melodramatics of an infinity edge. Much of the property remains ruggedly wooded and there’s a detached three-car garage attached to the backside of the guesthouse.

Like many wealthy and successful entertainment industry mandarins, the Emmy-, Grammy- and (honorary) Oscar-winning Mister Martin, the 69-year-old father of a toddler and one of Tinseltown’s top collectors of contemporary artworks, maintains an impressive portfolio of private residences. In addition to a humbly scaled if not exactly cheap one bedroom and one bathroom pied-à-terre in a distinguished building just off New York City’s Central Park West that he picked up in April 2008 for $885,000, Mister Martin also and owns Villa Au Soleil, a hilltop compound with panoramic sea views on the global glitterati-approved French West Indies island of St. Barts. Mister Martin has had his island getaway on and off the sales and rental markets for years and — as it turns out — is currently listed for sale at about $8.9 million and is also available to rent by the week at rates between $16,000 and $28,000. Back on the West Coast, Mister Martin owns a two-residence compound on a barely there cul-de-sac deep in the mountains above Beverly Hills. He acquired the first of the two properties, a 0.68 spread with a 7,000-square-foot-plus house, in early 1995 for $3,175,000 from Corbin Bernsen and Amanda Pays, and he picked up the neighboring 1.02-acre property in the fall of 1997 for an undisclosed amount.

By U.S. standards New York is a pretty old city, and over the years New Yorkers have been pretty diligent about preserving its historic architecture. As we head into the future, we’re seeing more and more old industrial buildings being transformed into beautiful homes. A great example is this Upper East Side penthouse in a water tower that is not only awesome in concept, but is also stunning to look at. Lili and Lee Siegelson, the couple who own the immaculate home, worked with Olson Kundig Architects, and together they transformed two floors of the building into an apartment big enough for their happy family.

When Olson Kundig Architects began an overhaul of the apartment five years ago, Lee had been living there for a half-decade, having purchased the eccentric tower space — effectively the building’s 18th floor, and tall enough to have its own small mezzanine — as a bachelor in 2004. After he married Lili and they had two kids, the couple added the (much more conventional) 17th floor, and now they had to figure out how to put it all together. “At some point,” says Tom Kundig, principal of Olson Kundig, “you just go, ‘At what point are we grown up? When do we start to make a true home?’ They might not agree with that,” he adds, starting to laugh, “but I see it all the time.”

Making a true home entailed completely gutting the 18th floor and cutting a stairwell through from below. The architects custom-designed many of the interior fittings, including a banquette-bench-table dining nook in the corner of the living room. Their polished refinements of utilitarian materials can be seen in details like the exposed-pulley handle that opens the upper windows. The Siegelsons “came to us because of our industrial sensibility,” Kundig says. “What I think of as industrial is authentic; it embraces the function of the place, the materials, and it’s an expression of how it all works together, and that is what they really liked.” To that end, they left the exposed brick walls alone and used steel-chain mesh to cover the huge arched windows in the living room, which extend nearly to the 19-foot ceiling. “It’s really tough and filters the light, and it’s never going to deteriorate in the sun.” They also added a fireplace and chimney — which, if you think about it, is a little funny with all that water overhead. “Thousands of gallons, just right up there above the apartment!” says one of Kundig’s colleagues when I mention it. No wonder the surrounding rooftop garden is so green.

Time makes us grow and mature, but we have to always keep our souls playful, no matter how old we are

claim the talents behind tAMINN Design studio. Proving their point, in July 2015, they completed the “Fun House”, a redesign of a 165-square-metre apartment in a brand new residential building, in Zhubei, Taiwan. The interior designers carefully abided by the client’s request that the final result hint at industrial style, albeit infused with colour.

The most important guideline though set by the clients, a young couple who now live in the apartment with their child, was that their names, somehow, appeared in their home. As a result, the main feature of the flat became “Mike & Isa”, a big light box that has become the centrepiece of this strange mix of styles, including French, industrial and country seen in the bistro-like dining area, a big barn door that is cleverly split between a storage room and the master bedroom, tough concrete walls and soft wooden doors which all fall playfully into place.

The designers’ ingenuity also brought together a large variety of materials, endowing the house with a unique character: iron accessories, titanium plating, brass, vintage wood, coloured plywood, handmade and metallic tiles, wallpaper, all seem to have been used in harmonious excess. As the designers claim: “We tried to divide the flat’s central, open space by using the diversity of various materials, especially on the floor. Wood and rugs were placed in the living room, black metal tiles at the entrance and concrete was used for the kitchen and the dining room”.

At the same time, the space remains connected through the dialogue encouraged between its different parts: the floor tiles at the entrance extend to the living area, while the kitchen island imposes itself on the dining table. In a similar vein, the desk shares its presence between the living room and the dining hall, while the bookcase is placed behind the dining table with its metal plated finishing clearly reflecting the TV area, thus blending one part of the room into the other.

The harshness of the strong materials used is lightened up by little details that have given a homey feel to the place, such as the brass, wood, iron and concrete “hello” carved on the floor, the metal coffee table that resembles a suitcase and an old railway clock placed strategically between the windows offering a breathtaking view of the city below, a big frame that looks like traditional Asian art is actually a magnetic blackboard that invites the young family to leave each other loving memos on the wall.

Exposed pipelines, exposed-concrete room dividers and unrefined woodwork create a half-done, “in progress” feel. Begging the question as to what this may have to do with maturity, the answer perhaps lies in maturity not as seriousness, but as something full of life, and when one us fully aware of the importance of fun and surprise in our lives.

Looking at this huge, honest-looking industrial loft with the old walls of rough brick, cracked wood beams, rusty mechanisms and flaky creaking doors, instantly forgetting that it is located on the top floor of a modern business center, and more recently was a new, blank and impersonal space.

The idea of converting  an empty floor of an apartment buildingto a loft was brought by a customer, and Leo Lugovskoy was happy to help, skillfully transforming a bare concrete space into a lively industrial interior. Good thing, he had plenty of space to work with: the area of the space is 130 sq meters and the ceiling height is 4.2 meters.

The master room all was imagined as a bachelor pad, along with a host experiencing a midlife crisis!

says the architect. Such description says that the customer is okay with humor and irony. In addition, he is an intellectual, lover of music and reading; so the main areas of the loft became a music library and a living room.

A special pride of the architect is the texture of the walls, beams, decking. The effect of the old shabby, “seasoned” surfaces appeared thanks to the artists studio Gregory Protasov.

The effect they have created is so natural

says Lev Lugovskoy

that people, once here, always asked me the same question: Why did you not paint the wall? Did you need to leave the wall to rust and with old paint ?

And that is the main evidence that the decorative component turned out to be very natural.

Equally convincing is the window, with a typical industrial look, old handles and a beautiful arched masonry of old bricks. Many of the objects and ideas in our interior were produced a long time ago – says the architect. We were hunting for them in stores, waiting for weeks of inspiration and joining solutions, dug antique shops in search of the object corresponding to the time and place.

For all his scrapes and authenticity of an old-fashioned loft, it is packed with modern technology: lighting equipment for organ concerts, high-tech sound system for high-quality audio playback and video projection installation to accompany private concerts.

The loft is called ‘recall house’ in Taiwan; the client intentionally requested for the dwelling to instill a vintage ambience. Balancing an industrial and rustic aesthetic, this is highlighted in the open plan arrangement consisting of the living, dining and kitchen, all three spaces have been unified and simultaneously, scaffolding-influenced and wooden features have been chosen for the shelves and dining table.

The residents have three pet cats whom they have requested the designers to specially create an individual nook next to the dining space as well as miniature arched doors for them to freely roam about. The unique character has been further enhanced by the materials used, shown in the careful combination of exposed brick, timber and metal, allowing the home to feel industrial but not cold. From the punctuated iron panel to the the vintage and collective pieces adorned around the house, the project achieves the harmony between comfort and contemporary.

This loft of 115 sq. meters located in the heart of Kyiv, Ukraine. A project is executed in style of loft with the use of great number of characteristic elements. An apartment is in new building in the center of city.

The architects’ starting point was to create a loft for a gentleman, rather than a hipster. Martin Architects came up with a bold design that’s not for the shy and retiring. A glass paned wall partly conceals a bedroom from the main living space, which faces an open kitchen, with a fire set ingeniously into its units.

The bold space is adorned with raw brick, cement and wood alongside refreshing designer furniture pieces. A wall of plants framed by reclaimed wood adds both a witty touch and greenery to a dining area. Colours throughout are masculine greys and browns, with yellow accents in rugs and lights, while exposed concrete forms the backdrop to an adventurously-styled bathroom.

The most important feature of this Kyiv Loft is furniture and elements of decor, which were made Ukrainian masters, companies and designers. Furniture of Igor Martin, developed for a company HIS (Home Ideas Supply), made debut in this project. The apartment is also a smart house; everything can be done through a smartphone.

An absolutely stunning example of modern loft design with a masculine touch.