An industrial warehouse becomes one couple's chic live-and-work space
11:48 AM CDT on Wednesday, May 6, 2009
By CHRISTOPHER WYNN / The Dallas Morning News cwynn@dallasnews.com
Photos: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/pt/slideshows/2009/05/studios1019_050709fd/
In an old industrial park off Wycliff Avenue, one warehouse stands distinctly apart from its beige and boxy neighbors.
The concrete facade is coated in black paint. Polished aluminum gleams on the Fort Knox-worthy door surround. A Louis Poulsen "Artichoke" lamp glows dramatically through the building's vertically stacked windows.
If this were an exam, the answer to the question "Which one of these is not alike?" would be obvious. The owners of this high-style revamp, Lynn Sugarman and Jim Nairne, are equally left of center. She's a former New York photographer turned design student; he's an eco-loving financial whiz who helped launch T. Boone Pickens' wind initiative.
Together, the couple created Studios 1019, an unconventional combo of home, photo studio and event space. The original incarnation was launched 16 years ago in side-by-side spaces Sugarman made over on Dragon Street. The 1011 address sold at the height of the real estate boom to Craighead Green Gallery. Neighboring namesake 1019 last year became Gerald Peters Gallery, and this month, new digs for contemporary furniture showroom Smink.
After decamping Dragon Street, the couple moved their live-work utopia two exits north of Oak Lawn's design district to Vantage Street. A quick remodel and sale of that property led them last May to their current building, one block west on Monitor Street.
Sugarman has become something of a serial warehouse flipper.
"Ms. Sugarman has got two bugs," Nairne says affectionately, brewing an espresso in the couple's sleek Euro kitchen. "One is the car bug from her dad. The other one is the building bug." (Call it a win-win: Lynn's remodels always include garage space for her latest Mercedes-Benz.)
The couple is on the leading edge of a wave transforming the industrial neighborhoods northwest of downtown. The flailing economy may have slowed the pace, but design showrooms and galleries continue to flock to the cheaper rents and larger spaces found from Dragon Street, up Industrial and Irving Boulevards, to the streets north of Wycliff, where Sugarman and Nairne have staked their latest claim.
They're not alone; Dallas Auction Gallery moved to a renovated warehouse on Monitor in 2007. Sugarman expects another boost when the Trinity River Corridor Project works out the kinks on its plans to bring parks, roads and architecturally significant bridges to the area.
In fact, one of the plan's proposed walking paths, the Trinity Strand Trail, will follow the beds where the Trinity once meandered, cross Monitor just steps from the Studios 1019 front door and eventually intersect Uptown's Katy Trail.
The beautification should be "magnificent for the area," says Sugarman, joining Nairne in the kitchen to hunt for some stashed biscotti. Even better, the confirmed dog lovers will be able to walk "the kids," beloved rescue mutts Tipper and Ozzie, on the new trail.
"If I had the money, I'd buy this whole block up," says Sugarman.
Nairne looks at her wide-eyed. "Let's take this 11,000 square feet at a time, please."
You know a renovation is making progress when the helicopters come to watch.
At least that's how Sugarman and Nairne felt last year when three traffic choppers detoured west off Stemmons Freeway to hover over their warehouse. "I couldn't believe it," Sugarman says with a laugh, recalling the noisy whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the blades.
The draw was a bird's-eye view of the 800-foot-wide hole punched into the building's roof. A crane stood grinding its gears in the parking lot as its long arm hoisted a steel-framed pyramid up and over the flat roof to cover the hole. The greenhouse-like skylight was secured and inlaid with thick panels of energy-efficient glass. (The environmentally friendly design was one of many green choices the couple made here, including on-demand water heaters, sustainable-cork and recycled-glass flooring, and rust-proof stainless air-conditioning units that use the eco-savvy Freon-replacement, Puron.)
Nairne describes the original 1960s space as "a huge empty warehouse with about 500 square feet of asbestos-filled, ratty-looking offices." He ponders another second before calling the facade "just as nasty."
Fortunately, Sugarman has plenty of imagination.
The native Texan grew up in San Antonio and the San Francisco Bay Area, but started developing her design eye in 1980s New York. ("Everyone should live there at least once," she declares. "You learn you're not the only person in the world.") Working as a photographer and set designer, she began renovating her 22nd Street loft to accommodate her sprawling projects.
"I was a newbie," she admits, "but I was used to interpreting art directors' layouts and working in three dimensions, so it segued into tackling my own space." The end result was sufficiently polished to snag a guest spot (as the home of a murdered photographer) on Law & Order. By now a self-confessed "architecture whore," Sugarman sold her Manhattan loft and moved to North Texas in the early '90s to slow down and get "a car, a dog and a life."
With proceeds from the sale of the loft, she commissioned prestigious San Antonio architecture firm Lake/Flato to help design a modern ranch house in Sanger, Texas. She also purchased a '60s-era print shop on Dragon Street to renovate as a studio and event space.
By decade's end, Nairne had become her partner, both in renovations and in life. "We met online," Sugarman adds coyly. (Things got off to a rocky start when Nairne suddenly stopped calling. "What a typical man," Lynn remembers thinking at the time. Turns out, he'd been hospitalized with a busted leg and was too medicated to work the phone.) In 2002, they married and traded the crickets of Sanger for full-time warehouse living.
The Dragon Street renovations led to another partnership, this one with global powerhouse architecture and design firm Gensler. Sugarman credits senior designer Christopher Goggin for inspiring her to give up photography to study interior design (which will add a third degree to her résumé). "He became my mentor of sorts."
Goggin created the original scheme for the Dragon project, which became Sugarman's jumping-off point for Monitor. Goggin praises the outcome as "purely a product of her design eye, not mine," though he admits being pleased that the space bears a hint of his own "slightly twisted" mind.
There's a fanciful quality to this sprawling wonderland that can make a visitor feel almost childlike.
Inside, it's a series of surprises – unfolding spaces, long hallways, and towering steel-and-glass doors that would appear to take all one's might to push open (but don't, thanks to commercial-grade hinges and precise engineering).
There's even a secret panel of sorts. In the couple's spa-like master bath, a massive Julian Schnabel lithograph is mounted on a hidden track. Slide the art to the right, and shelves appear, stacked with toiletries.
If you could slice off the warehouse roof and peek inside, you'd see three distinct zones: the residence, a central atrium and a suite of commercial photography studios.
The wow factor begins right in the front entry, a voluminous space grounded by cork floors and crowned with the Poulsen fixture. Turn right, and a hall leads to the trio of expansive photo studios: light-flooded by day, ghostly by night with their floors, walls and ceilings painted stark white.
Straight ahead is the entry to the couple's living space, commanded by a pair of 18-foot doors crafted by Dallas metalworker Lee Trautmann. Trautmann's Amadeus Metalworks studio also created the acid-washed steel used on stair railings and the wall-mounted gas fireplace in the couple's living room.
The dining room makes its own style statement, with a sculptural chandelier from Scott + Cooner and barn-style doors that open to the adjoining kitchen. The solid maple doors, sliding on German steel bearings, flow easily despite weighing 220 pounds each.
"We had more than 30 people here for Thanksgiving, and it was nice to be able to just pile up the dirty dishes and close off the doors," Nairne says.
"They also add another sculptural element," says Sugarman, "and they're certainly not going to go out of style."
The heart of the commercial space is the soaring, skylight-topped atrium – complete with Mies leather daybed, 15-foot waterfall and slate ledgestone walls.
Sugarman says the atrium was inspired by East & Orient Co. on Slocum Street. "They basically kept the facade, but took the roof off, and I've wanted a building like that ever since."
To help create the interior green space, Sugarman turned to landscaper Kevin Ford of Blackland Prairie Design, known for sculpting the garden of Kenny Goss and George Michael's Dallas manse. Ford designed steel planters filled with succulents and "angular and lean," drought-tolerant euphorbia. The high-tech synthetic grass is pet friendly, if need be.
The room's central support column was "the bane of my existence," says Sugarman. "I mean, who wants a measly white pole in the middle of a great atrium?"
Sugarman called in an engineer and her contractor of 30 years, Clay Butler (who also did the Art of Old India space on Dragon), who devised a plan to remove the pole and replace it with a horizontal steel beam – at a cost of almost $20,000. Time for Plan B. Fortunately, Ford provided one. "I had just come back from LA and the Getty Center, and was fascinated by the rebar umbrella installations," he says of the museum's magnificent, tree-like garden trellises draped with bougainvillea. Ford adapted the concept for the atrium, with rebar twining the pole and fanning out to evoke a tree canopy. The effect is supernatural.
Sugarman says she'd love to "camp out on the grass" some night during a thunderstorm and watch the light show. And "no problem with mosquitoes," she notes, although they did find a grass snake in a shoe once.
For Nairne, the outdoors is accessible via personal scissor lift (so much for bragging about your Viking range). He frequently rides the hydraulic platform 20 feet up to a ceiling hatch that pops open to the roof. The 360-degree panorama includes a spectacular view of the downtown skyline. It's an ideal spot, perhaps ironically so, to escape the hustle and bustle of city life.
"I'd love to put a little wine bar up here," Nairne jokes, "or maybe just a hammock."
With Monitor nearing completion, it's hard not to wonder: Is there another warehouse in the couple's future?
"Oh, Jim says, 'Never again, you're going to have to bury me here,' " groans Sugarman. Nairne just smiles in a "no comment" way and gets the dogs leashed for a walk.
Truth be known, Sugarman's already got her sights on their next property. Her defense: "I'm just a warehouse woman."
It's another chance to put her creative chops to the test and collaborate once more with the couple's growing collection of artisans and designers. Sugarman says the secret is "listening to people, being open minded and not thinking that you know it all."
What we know is that, on some street in this evolving industrial neighborhood, another building awaits the Sugarman touch.
E-mail cwynn@dallasnews.com
