A warehouse conversion that had stopped working for the people inside it
"We loved the bones of the place. We just couldn't live in it anymore."
The Whitfields bought their loft in 2016, drawn to its exposed brick, steel-framed windows, and the kind of ceiling height you don't find in a new-build. Nine years and two children later, the apartment that once felt expansive had become a maze of underused corners: a formal dining room nobody sat in, a galley kitchen too narrow for two people to cook in at once, and a living room dominated by a fireplace nobody used.
They came to Field & Form not for a cosmetic refresh, but to ask a harder question — could the same 1,240 square feet support a family of four without an extension? The brief was specific: open the kitchen into the living space, give each child a room that could grow with them, and keep the industrial character that made them buy the place to begin with.
What follows is the project as it actually happened, room by room, including the decisions we'd make differently next time.
Three problems, one shared root cause
Every issue in the apartment traced back to a single decision made during the original 1998 conversion: the developer had split the open warehouse floor into a conventional room layout, using stud walls to recreate a suburban house plan inside an industrial shell. That worked for the loft's first owners, but it fought against everything that made the space distinctive.
The kitchen sat furthest from the windows and received almost no daylight after 11am. The dining room, sealed off behind a wall, was used twice a year. And the sole bathroom served both children and guests, creating a bottleneck every weekday morning. None of these were finish problems — new tile or paint wouldn't touch them. They were plan problems, and they needed a plan-level answer.
Kitchen & Living Room
What we changed
We removed the non-structural wall separating the kitchen from the dining room and replaced the run of upper cabinets with open shelving in blackened steel, echoing the window frames. An 11-foot island now does the work of a table, a prep counter, and a room divider — its far side finished in the same brick-red micro-cement as the original chimney breast, so it reads as part of the architecture rather than a new insertion.
Why it works
Daylight from the steel-framed windows now reaches 40% deeper into the plan. More importantly, the kitchen became the room the family actually gathers in — which was the real brief underneath the stated one. Removing a single wall solved three complaints at once: poor light, a wasted dining room, and a kitchen too small for two cooks.
Living Area & Fireplace Wall
What we changed
The disused gas fireplace was capped and replaced with a full-height built-in banquette in bouclé wool, framing the steel windows as the room's real focal point. Furniture was pulled off the walls and arranged around a low, round travertine table, encouraging conversation rather than television-facing rows.
Why it works
The fireplace was consuming the best wall in the apartment for a feature the family hadn't used in years. The banquette gives the same square footage back as genuinely usable seating for six, plus hidden storage beneath for the children's toys — a request that came up in almost every client conversation.
Children's Bedroom
What we changed
Given the apartment's soaring 3.6m ceilings, we built a plywood mezzanine sleep nook for the older child, freeing the floor below for a play area and a full-height storage wall finished in the same ochre tone used sparingly throughout the apartment. The younger child's bed sits beneath, with a shared reading ladder joining the two levels.
Why it works
Rather than treat the ceiling height as wasted volume, we used it to solve the "two kids, one room" problem without a wall. The design is also built to be reconfigured — the mezzanine can be dismantled in an afternoon once the children are older and want separate rooms elsewhere in the flat.
Family Bathroom
What we changed
We split the single bathroom into two zones behind a pocket door: a dry area with a double vanity and hand-glazed zellige tile in a soft sage, and a separate wet room housing the shower, tub, and toilet. This lets one parent get a child ready while another showers — the exact morning bottleneck the family flagged in our first meeting.
Why it works
No square footage was added; the existing footprint was simply re-zoned. It's the clearest example in the whole project of how a plan-level fix outperforms a finishes-level one, and it was also the single highest-satisfaction change the clients mentioned in their post-project review.
A palette built from the building, not against it
Every material choice had to hold its own next to 100-year-old brick and steel.
Rather than introduce a decorating "theme," we pulled the palette directly from materials already present in the building: the rust of the steel windows, the clay of the exposed brick, the patina on the original cast-iron columns. New materials were chosen to sit quietly alongside these, never to compete with them. The result is a home where a 1920s warehouse and a family of four coexist without either one being renovated into submission.
The details that carry the concept
What changed, in numbers
"We didn't need more space. We needed the space we had to make sense. Field & Form kept asking how we actually used each room instead of how a room is supposed to look — that question changed everything about the outcome."
Considering a transformation of your own?
We take on a limited number of residential projects each quarter. Tell us about your space and what isn't working — we'll tell you honestly whether a renovation or a rethink is what you actually need.
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