Chicago Financial Firm
The design of this office space incorporates the existing building materials of brick and concrete into a vintage palette of tile, brass, and custom woodwork.
The addition of a barista space helped encourage more social interaction and impromptu meetings between colleagues due to the service provided and ambiance of the cafe.
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Thirteen Years Later, the Same Building
Kuchar's founder led her first solo design project inside this building in 2007. Thirteen years on, the studio returned to design the firm's expansion, blending the original scheme with current work. The building is a century old and sits on the Chicago River, and its industrial character — original concrete, exposed brick, metal detail — was never in question. Kuchar celebrated it, then warmed it: a vintage palette of tile, brass, and custom woodwork laid over the existing structure. Patterns drawn from classic menswear, plaid and herringbone, run through the selections. The largest conference room sets leather wall panels, gold leaf wallcovering, and a custom solid wood table against exposed concrete columns and ceiling. Elsewhere, reclaimed lumber from the company's own stock became a herringbone feature wall. The result is high-end and hard-working at once.
Kuchar designed the employee cafe to read as a neighborhood cafe rather than an office — a custom tile floor patterned after old cafe floors, vintage-style furniture, brass fixtures wrapping the columns, custom wood panels — and the room now carries lunch alongside the impromptu meetings that once needed a conference room. Smaller teapoints serve the far edges of a large floor plate. Workspace interior design in Chicago increasingly borrows this logic, because an office competes with the coffee shop down the street for the hours its people choose to spend in it. Bringing in cafe interior designers for a workplace is no longer a novelty. It is how a floor plate earns attendance.
A Chicago Commercial Design Partner You Can Build With
Commercial and office design is our craft, and the Kuchar team carries more than 90 years of combined industry experience. We design workplaces that give people a reason to be in them, inside buildings whose history is worth keeping.