The gold coast apartment
Location
Scope
Year
Duration
Gold Coast, Chicago
Spacial Consultation
2024
6 months
the brief
The client had recently downsized from a large family home to this pre-war apartment on the Gold Coast. On paper the apartment was generous — nearly 2,800 square feet with original details intact. In practice, it felt impossible to inhabit comfortably.
She was living in the kitchen. The formal rooms sat unused. The primary suite felt like a hotel she hadn't checked out of. The apartment had been furnished expensively and impeccably — and it had no warmth at all.
This was a consultation project, not a full direction. My role was to diagnose what was wrong and prescribe a path — one she could execute herself, on her timeline, without starting over.
too much space,
enough room.
client
Private Residence
property
Pre-war apartment, 2,800 sq ft
rooms
Living, dining, primary suite
scope
Spatial consultation
Completed
September 2024
SOLÉNE'S APPROACH
The furniture
was fine. The
logic wasn't.
I spent a full day in the apartment before I said anything. I watched how the light moved. I noted which rooms she walked through and which ones she avoided. I sat in every chair. The diagnosis took about three hours.
The problem was not the furniture — most of it was beautiful. The problem was that it had been placed for how the rooms looked in photographs, not for how a person actually moves through them. The sofa faced a view no one ever looked at. The dining table was too far from the kitchen. The bedroom had no quiet corner.
I gave her a written spatial strategy — twelve pages, room by room — with specific recommendations for what to move, what to remove, what to add, and in what order. No contractors required. No new purchases for the first three months.
"Sometimes the most radical thing I can do is tell a client to stop buying things and start living in what they already have."
Clarity over
acquisition
key design decisions
A consultation is about diagnosis, not decoration. These three recommendations changed how the entire apartment functioned.
01.
02.
03.
The seating arrangement faced the window, which in the Gold Coast means facing east — beautiful in the morning, blinding by afternoon. Rotating the grouping toward the fireplace made the room usable at all hours and gave it an anchor it had always been missing.
Rotating the living room 90°
She entertained four times a year at most. The formal dining room was consuming 400 square feet of the apartment's best light for the sake of a table used rarely. We repurposed it as a reading room. The dining table moved to the kitchen end of the open plan, where it gets used daily.
Removing the formal dining room
The primary suite had no place to sit other than the bed. One linen chair, one side table, one lamp — placed in the east-facing corner by the window. She told me three weeks later that she had started reading again for the first time in years.
A chair by the window in the bedroom
the outcome
She stopped
missing her
old house.
Three months after delivering the spatial strategy, the client called to tell me that she had implemented everything on the list — in order, over six weeks — and that the apartment had become somewhere she genuinely wanted to be.
Nothing structural changed. She bought two new pieces of furniture over the course of the engagement. The rest was reorganisation, editing, and the willingness to trust the process.
This project is a reminder that great spatial design is not always about what you add. Sometimes it is entirely about what you finally allow yourself to remove.