the wicker loft
Location
Scope
Year
Duration
Wicker Park, Chicago
Full Interior Direction
2023
14 months
the brief
The client, a sculptor and part-time professor, had purchased a former printing warehouse in Wicker Park with no clear plan for what it should become. He knew only two things: he wanted to be able to work in it, and he wanted to be able to live in it. Those two requirements, he assumed, were in conflict.
The space was extraordinary. Exposed brick on three walls. Original iron columns every twelve feet. Fourteen-foot ceilings throughout. A bank of north-facing industrial windows that produced a light unlike anything I had worked with before, cool, even, unforgiving in the best possible way.
The challenge was not to soften the space or domesticate it. It was to make it liveable without making it less than what it was. The loft had to hold both a working studio and a private home, and it could not apologise for either.
Raw space. The question
was how much of it
to leave that way.
client
Private Residence
property
Industrial loft conversion, 3,100 sq ft
rooms
All rooms, full build-out
scope
Full Interior Direction
Completed
November 2023
SOLÉNE'S APPROACH
Two lives
in one space.
No compromise.
The brief called for a space that could hold a sculptor's practice and a private life simultaneously — not alternately. The work and the living had to coexist, which meant they had to respect each other rather than retreat from each other.
I organised the loft around a single spine — a long, low shelving structure that ran the length of the space. On one side: the studio, deliberately rough, tools visible, nothing precious. On the other: the living areas, warm and inhabited. The spine allowed each side to be fully itself without the other intruding.
Materials were specified to age well in a working environment. Concrete floors throughout. Unfinished oak millwork. Plaster walls that would absorb marks and not be diminished by them.
"A space that has to work for two contradictory purposes is not a problem to solve. It is a tension to honor."
Honesty over
finish.
key design decisions
This project demanded decisions that most residential designers would never make. Each one required trusting that the space could handle the truth.
01.
02.
03.
Every contractor and two other designers had recommended painting the brick white. I refused. The original brick — dark, uneven, marked with a century of industrial use — is the single most important material in the building. Painting it would have been an act of erasure. We cleaned it, sealed it, and left it exactly as we found it.
Leaving the brick unpainted
No walls were added anywhere in the principal space. The shelving spine — three metres tall, twelve metres long, in unfinished white oak — is the only division between studio and living. It creates separation without enclosure. Both sides can see the ceiling, the columns, the windows. The space breathes as one.
The spine as the only partition
The studio side has bare concrete throughout — polished to a low sheen, nothing more. On the living side, two large hand-knotted rugs in faded natural tones define the seating and dining areas. The transition between the two is immediate and legible. You know which world you are in the moment you cross the spine.
Concrete floors, no rugs in the studio
the outcome
A space that
holds both lives
without flinching.
The Wicker Park Loft was the most demanding project Maison Solène has undertaken. Fourteen months, a full build-out, and a brief that required resolving a genuine contradiction rather than designing around it.
The result is a space that does not look like a home trying to accommodate a studio, or a studio trying to feel like a home. It looks like a place that has always known what it is — which is exactly what the client asked for from the very first conversation.
He has since told me that his work changed after moving in. That the quality of the light, and the feeling of being surrounded by a space that took his practice seriously, shifted something in what he makes. That is not something I can take credit for. But it is something I am proud to have made possible.