This tower carries a pedigree most remodels never touch: Robert Seeley De Golyer designed it in 1926, the year the Chicago Tribune called it the largest and finest apartment building in the city. De Golyer trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition, and his interior planning — the relationship of the parts to the whole — remains the unit's greatest asset. Our client had inherited the fifteenth-floor home after more than forty years in her family, and she wanted Old Hollywood: warm, functional, made for entertaining.

The dining room was the historical treasure, its walls clad in quarter-figured anigre quoted. Much of the original molding had gone missing or fallen into disrepair, so our team custom-fabricated the wood and plaster profiles, matched them to the 1926 detailing, and patch-repaired until the seams disappeared. We restored the original hardwood as well and added discreet modern lighting that brightens the delicate millwork.

Elsewhere, the work was reinvention. The living room had become a white box — white walls, white ceiling, white floor, white millwork — and Lake Michigan, its best feature, was lost in the glare. We warmed the palette, added a silver-leaf ceiling and mid-century furniture, and skim-coated the walls to a luxurious finish to tone every color and pull the eye toward the water. The primary bath demanded the most precision: we ground the structural concrete subfloor by hand to create a seamless threshold into the bedroom and sent the original cast-iron radiators offsite to be refurbished and reset.

Old Hollywood was never built here; it was uncovered — and a careful restoration readied the home for another generation of the family that has kept it for forty years.