Lake Shore Drive Remodel – Rough Finishes 3D

• June 30, 2022

Take a tour of the “rough finishes” stage of an incredible Lake Shore Drive condominium. Architect Amy Scruggs shares the step-by-step thinking behind a total redesign of a 1920s Chicago co-op and some of the challenges of remodeling in a city high-rise on Lake Michigan.

This room here, at least temporarily has been our staging area for all of our bath vanities that are coming in. So – as we start fabricating cabinets and fabricating cabinet side panels, we need to make sure that not only are they going to fit in the elevator, but they have to fit through the maze of the lower level that connects the alley, where we can do a drop-off, and the freight elevator. And it takes many, many people to get it just right and we spend a lot of time during the shop drawing process to make sure everything is going to fit.

Alright, so, one of the most fun things to share with you is that we have all of our kitchen cabinetry installed. The kitchen is long, it’s a little bit narrow, and we were worried that there would probably be just this feeling of too many cabinets without having something reflective, bounce light around. And this owner was a little bit concerned about doing clear glass because they didn’t want to have to curate the inside of their cabinets and have everything be beautiful all the time. And we asked our fabricator if they could take a glass sample that had some texture, and apply a mirror coating to it. So that we would still get the reflectivity but we wouldn’t be able to quite see ourselves. And I’m pleased to say this is the result. It’s a very fun, interesting pattern and it’s what we’ll be able to see that’s going to be inset into these doors.

This area is going to be a sort of a future bar and so to differentiate this cabinet from the rest of the cabinets, we put a beautiful nickel grill inset into the doors. It’s a cabinet that will be lit. It’s a cabinet they can use as a nightlight. But it’ll really become sort of a focal part of the kitchen. And, because it’s very close and adjacent to the family room, and to under-counter refrigeration, which isn’t in yet, it makes for a natural place to have a bar set up for entertaining – so that all the hard work and the cooking, which is going to happen behind me, can remain separate.

This space here, this is where the range top is going to go. And we want to make sure that as you’re cooking you have access to whatever spices you might need. So we do a pullout spice drawer, graduated shelves. But we’ve also been doing lately pullouts closer to the range in a way to store utensils so that they’re upright – so you can fit slotted spoons, or whisks, or spatulas or things like that. They’re conveniently located in a pullout here. There’s stainless canisters in there so, whatever you need, you can grab, likety-split.

Behind these cabinets there’s a big chase and in that chase is a bunch of piping that goes up and down 22 floors. We’ve been very creative about how we’ve used the cabinetry space. So, over here we have a big pantry, great storage, pull outs, full depth, awesome. Over here, which is where the chase is, we’ve built a shallow cabinet. So, a very, very creative way to make use of storage that would otherwise not be used – for something that’s very useful, wine and when it’s all said and done and everything is all closed up, you’d never even know that that cabinet wasn’t full-depth or pantry storage.

We have an extremely large, super-professional range top coming in. And we’ve built a custom hood, that houses a hood liner. And in the inside of that hood liner there is a big 10-inch duct that comes out of the hood liner, goes across the ceiling and exits the building. It took some creativity. It took some gymnastics and it took some careful planning to make sure that all of that duct work could get rerouted around existing concrete beams and recessed lights and everything else.

This is a very old building. The ceiling is not level. The floor is not level and the walls are not a uniform dimension. They aren’t in most houses, in most apartments, even new construction. We’ve had these cabinets fabricated for this space and for this space alone. And what I love to see when we come in and you really can only see this before the counters go in but every cabinet has a number. It’s just handwritten. There’s such a, sort of a lost art, everything we get now seems so mass-produced and fabricated and we have whoever made this just writing in their own handwriting. And it’s just, part of the job that’s one of those things that most people don’t see and maybe most people don’t even care about but I just think it’s really cool.