The Chef's Loft

" Hi! I'm Amy Albert and this is the space we designed for Renovation Style magazine. I guess it's an urban, minimal, modern, matrix modern style. Our fictional homeowner is a 40-something, single, celebrity chef, a professional chef, a man who has worked abroad. He's trained in Paris. He's worked in restaurants in Los Angeles and New York. He's very urban. He's very sophisticated and because he travels a lot and has lived in big cities, he was really interested in having an urban loft sort of setting. The raw space that we began with was a very long, narrow, tunnel-like room. It has very high ceilings about 16 feet high, but just was 1 level and only about a total of 14 or 15 feet wide and about 40 feet long. So it was like a big long hallway and the challenge was to pack a lot of living into a very narrow space, but yet not make it feel tunnel-like. We decided probably the best way to start was to find an architect because this is something we write a lot about in our magazines. Is that professional expertise is really valuable particularly in a situation like this where you have to make use of every square inch. You can't let anything go to waste. He came up with a really very innovative plan that would make the best use out of this space and one of the key elements of that was a centerpiece structure. It's a 2-level sort of a box within this unit that helps define the various living areas without actually putting up walls. On the lower level, we have a combined living, dining, and kitchen area. This is a very kitchen-focused space and so the living and kitchen are virtually one on the main floor, and then in the first part when you walk into our unit from the main door, there's a little office entry room and a laundry room. Then on the 2nd level, we have the master's suite, if you wanna call it that, which is basically just a bedroom. We have 1 bedroom and we have a bath up there and a small walk-in closet upstairs. It was important that we create private areas because, of course, you need that in every living space, but at the same time, we wanted to have a translucence or an openness so light could pass through and there would be visually a more open feeling. So we accomplished that in part by using a lot of unusual materials and including the metal grating and the metal grating floor and the metal grating stair. It divides the but still let's the light and air move through. I think one of the great advantages of loft living is that because these structures tend to be right in the downtown areas that it means you're really plugged in to the city and into all the cultural and athletic and whatever shopping and all the activities that are happening in a city. Loft living really does plug you in to what's happening in the downtown area, and there's a lot going on."