Range Design & Architecture Wraps a Chicago Furniture Studio in a Porous Brick Veil

Chicago has always been a brick city. From the common-brick three-flats lining its side streets to the ornamental face-brick storefronts along its commercial corridors, masonry is less a stylistic choice than a structural reflex. When Range Design & Architecture took on the conversion of a long-vacant dentist's office on West Armitage in Logan Square, the firm didn't reach for a fashionable cladding palette. Instead, it doubled down on the material that made the neighborhood, extending load-bearing common brick walls upward and wrapping the street-facing side in a screen of terra-cotta colored paver bricks that filters light like a slow, deliberate blink.

The result is the headquarters for Nothing Design Co., a 3,500-square-foot furniture studio, showroom, and event space that grew out of a one-story shell into a two-story volume topped with a mezzanine and a rooftop terrace. What makes the project worth studying isn't just its fidelity to Chicago's masonry tradition. It's the way that tradition gets instrumentalized: the brick screen is simultaneously solar shading, privacy barrier, light modulator, and contextual gesture. Every decision traces back to the narrow infill lot and the hard constraints it imposes, especially the prohibition on openings along the east and west party walls. Those limits forced light to arrive only from the north and south, which is precisely what makes the building's sectional strategy so sharp.

The Screen as Environmental Device

From the street, the south-facing facade reads as a porous wall rather than a conventional storefront. Terra-cotta paver bricks alternate between standard masonry courses and vertically oriented spacers, producing a pattern that is regular enough to feel deliberate and open enough to let daylight pass. The screen's primary job is thermal: south-facing glazing in a narrow urban lot is an invitation for overheating, and the brick veil cuts direct solar gain without eliminating the light itself. Behind it sits a xeriscape planting strip that buffers the glazing and introduces a sliver of habitat into the hardscaped streetscape.

At dusk, the screen inverts. Interior light spills through the gaps, and the building glows like a lantern above the sidewalk. The entry passage, marked by illuminated house numbers, punches through the brick plane cleanly, signaling arrival without grandstanding. It's a restrained move that trusts the material to do the heavy lifting.

Light, Shadow, and the Interior Atmosphere

Inside, the perforated brick screen becomes something closer to a projector. As the sun moves, patterned shadows crawl across white oak surfaces and concrete floors, producing the kind of animated interior that architects sketch optimistically and rarely achieve at this resolution. The stairwell is the best demonstration: timber treads and a slat balustrade sit directly behind the screen, so ascending the stairs means walking through shifting bars of light that register the hour as vividly as any clock.

Wood-paneled rooms on the upper level receive this dappled light with warmth, the grain of the oak catching and releasing the pattern in a way that a white plaster wall never could. The choice to clad interior surfaces in natural timber wasn't decorative. It was calibrated to work with the screen's apertures, turning what could be a harsh striping effect into something ambient and textured.

Brick Meets Timber at the Detail Scale

The meeting point between brick and wood is where the project's care shows most clearly. A close-up of the stacked brick column adjoining the timber lattice screen reveals clean, deliberate joints and a tonal warmth that makes the two materials feel like natural companions rather than forced contrasts. Weathering steel appears at connection points and structural frames, adding a third material that will patinate over time and further bind the building to its site.

Range had originally envisioned heavy timber roof framing, but budget reality steered the team toward parallel chord trusses. It's a pragmatic substitution that doesn't register as a compromise in the finished building, largely because the visible material story remains coherent: brick on the perimeter, white oak inside, steel at the transitions.

The Showroom Floor and Mezzanine

For a furniture company, the showroom has to function as both gallery and workplace, and the double-height main volume handles that duality well. A concrete-topped kitchen island anchored by three stools sits beneath a circular ceiling fixture, offering a grounded domestic register in what is otherwise a lofty, workshop-scaled room. Vertical wood slat screens subdivide without enclosing, and clerestory skylights, which vent passively through solar-powered mechanisms, wash the marble countertop in even, overhead light.

The mezzanine floats above this gathering space, providing elevated vantage points for viewing furniture prototypes and hosting events. The decision to go double-height rather than simply adding a conventional second floor gives the building sectional variety that its modest footprint wouldn't otherwise allow.

Rooftop and Outdoor Rooms

The rooftop terrace extends the brick screen upward as a parapet, framing views of the Logan Square skyline through the same perforated pattern that defines the street facade. Steel frames provide structural armature without closing off the sky, and the effect is that of standing inside the building's own ornament. On the yard-facing side, a second-floor patio opens through bi-folding glazed doors, collapsing the boundary between interior showroom and exterior gathering space.

At ground level, the narrow planting strip between the screen and the staircase captures direct sunlight and channels it into the building's lower zones. It's a tight, almost residual space, but the xeriscape plantings transform it into a miniature garden that softens the hard edges of the infill condition and supports a small pocket of urban habitat close to the adjacent linear park.

Why This Project Matters

Most adaptive-reuse projects in Chicago acknowledge brick by keeping a few exposed walls and calling it context. Range Design & Architecture went further. By using reclaimed common brick structurally, deploying new paver brick as a performative screen, and insulating the envelope to contemporary standards, the firm demonstrated that Chicago's masonry vernacular is not a nostalgic reference but an active, adaptable building system. The constraints of the narrow lot, the party-wall restrictions, and a tight budget didn't limit the design so much as sharpen it.

Nothing Design Co.'s headquarters is proof that a 3,500-square-foot building on a 3,125-square-foot lot can punch well above its weight class. It provides passive ventilation through solar-powered skylights, reduces cooling loads through a south-facing screen, and creates a sequence of interior and exterior rooms that feel generous despite the site's dimensions. For designers working on infill sites in legacy masonry cities, this is the benchmark: not a building that quotes tradition, but one that puts tradition back to work.

Nothing Design Co. Headquarters by Range Design & Architecture. Located at 3426 West Armitage, Logan Square, Chicago, Illinois. 3,500 square feet. Completed in 2024. Structural Engineer: Louis Shell Structures, Inc. Landscape Architect: Nathan Wright Landscape Design. General Contractor: Formed Space. Photography by James John Jetel.

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