Muqaddas Akkari Studio Carves a Sculptural Home from a Tribeca Candy Factory

Converting a former candy factory into a home sounds like a story that writes itself, but the real difficulty is less romantic. The building, a six-story red brick structure in Tribeca dating to the 1880s, retains all the spatial excess of industrial architecture: 18-foot ceilings, exposed timber beams, a large skylight, and an open plan that reads as volume rather than domesticity. Muqaddas Akkari Studio spent two years on a full gut renovation of one of the five apartments inside, and the result is an interior that manages to feel both grand and genuinely livable.

The most interesting move here is the staircase. The original apartment had a narrow metal spiral stair tucked near what is now the kitchen. The studio pulled it out and replaced it with a sculptural plaster form that connects the two floors and operates as the spatial core of the entire home. Everything else in the plan orbits around it. That decision, trading a utilitarian vertical link for a piece of architecture that organizes sequence, flow, and sightlines, is what elevates the project beyond a high-end loft renovation.

The Staircase as Architectural Spine

The new staircase is the undeniable protagonist. Its cream-colored plaster balustrade curves continuously from one floor to the next, contrasting with the raw brick walls it sits against. The form is sculptural without being overwrought: it reads as a smooth, organic volume that softens the industrial skeleton of the loft. Timber treads ground it materially, connecting it to the warmth of the cabinetry and flooring found elsewhere.

From above, the stairwell reveals its geometry most clearly: an arched opening at the base and a tight spiral above, with daylight washing down through the upper level. The studio has spoken about floor plan work being the most transformative part of the project, and this element proves the point. The staircase doesn't just move you between levels. It establishes the rhythm of the entire apartment.

Viewed from oblique angles and through darkened timber doorframes, the stair becomes almost abstract. Its intersecting plaster volumes catch ambient daylight in ways that shift throughout the day. There is a deliberate tension between the precision of the curves and the roughness of the surrounding brick, and the studio lets that tension do the expressive work rather than adding ornament.

Living with 18-Foot Ceilings

The double-height spaces are both the gift and the challenge of this apartment. Warm afternoon light floods through arched windows and a clerestory skylight, dramatizing the exposed brick walls and the heavy timber beams that span the ceiling. These are the bones that the studio chose to preserve entirely, and they anchor every room in a sense of historical weight that no new material could replicate.

To keep the proportions from feeling cavernous, the design introduces furniture with sculptural presence: burled wood pieces, low seating, and layered textiles that pull the scale down to something human. The painted ceiling in the living area is a subtle but effective move, creating a softer canopy overhead while still allowing the structural beams to read clearly. The result is a room that feels tall without feeling empty.

Kitchen and Bar: Craft in the Details

The kitchen occupies the space where the original spiral stair once stood, a smart swap that gives the cooking zone more centrality in the open plan. Walnut cabinetry and white marble countertops establish a restrained palette, while a substantial island with timber base and bar stools creates a social anchor beneath the exposed ceiling beams. The stainless range with brass knobs and oak cabinetry on the back wall show a care for material consistency that runs throughout the project.

Adjacent moments reveal the depth of the studio's detailing. Light timber cabinetry with integrated appliances sits flush against exposed brick, its grain catching afternoon sun. A pantry area features open shelving with mosaic tile backing and a reeded glass sliding door, a combination that feels considered rather than decorative. The bar alcove, framed by timber posts and lined with maroon paneling, is a small room within a room: a fluted timber front, a record display, a pendant light, and a burgundy surround that gives it the intimacy of a private club.

Bathrooms and the Palette of Warmth

The bathrooms carry the project's material logic into tighter quarters. A walnut double vanity with a stone countertop sits above a black and white octagonal mosaic floor, a nod to period patterning without nostalgia. The tiled shower enclosure uses brass fixtures and a recessed niche with the same mosaic, establishing continuity across the wet zone. A freestanding white bathtub beside a window with woven shade and a wooden stool achieves a calm that the grander rooms build toward.

Elsewhere, the bathrooms diverge in material personality. An oval mirror above a textured stone vanity with timber base suggests a quieter register. A sauna with slatted benches sits adjacent to a shower niche with rainfall head, a pairing that feels luxurious without excess. Perhaps the most striking surface in the entire apartment is an oxidized copper wall panel behind a brass faucet on burgundy veined marble: a moment of controlled opulence that rewards close looking.

Moments of Character

A project of this caliber lives or dies in its secondary spaces, and these hold up well. The bar nook, with its fluted timber front, burgundy walls, and record display, is the kind of personal detail that signals a home rather than a showroom. The powder room vanity, clad in variegated copper tile against purple plaster walls, takes a bold chromatic risk that pays off precisely because the rest of the apartment is so materially disciplined.

Built-in shelving with cylindrical columns and closed cabinetry, a painting casually propped against the wall: these are rooms designed for accumulation, for the slow layering of a life. The custom closet with two-tone wood shelving, drawer banks, and angular display rods under a coffered ceiling shows the same attention to craft in a space most projects would treat as afterthought.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan reveals the two-level organization and the centrality of the curved staircase in connecting them. What reads on paper as a simple duplex is in practice a carefully calibrated sequence of rooms, thresholds, and openings. The stair's position generates a clear circulation loop on each level, keeping the open plan legible without relying on corridors. It is the kind of plan where every decision about wall placement and doorway width has downstream spatial consequences, and the studio appears to have controlled them all.

Why This Project Matters

Tribeca loft renovations are a saturated genre. The formula is well established: expose the brick, keep the beams, add a kitchen island, and photograph it at golden hour. Muqaddas Akkari Studio follows none of those steps carelessly. The two-year timeline suggests a process where each material choice and spatial relationship was tested, not assumed. The staircase alone, a piece of architecture embedded within an interior project, justifies the effort.

What makes the Tribeca Residence worth studying is its balance of ambition and restraint. The 18-foot ceilings and the industrial bones could have been left to do all the work, but the studio chose to introduce new formal language, the plaster curves, the copper and maroon accents, the carefully framed thresholds, that stands on its own. The result is a home that respects its past without being subservient to it, and that feels genuinely authored rather than merely curated.

Tribeca Residence by Muqaddas Akkari Studio, New York, United States. Completed 2025. Photography by Joe Kramm.

About the Studio

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