RDK Design Updates a Chicago High-Rise Apartment

Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood is known for its historic mansions. But it’s also home to some stellar modernist high-rises. RDK Design’s clients—a lawyer and a doctor with college-age children—live in just such a tower. They asked the firm to freshen up their 3,300-square-foot apartment so it better matched the building.

Interior Design Hall of Famer Robert Kleinschmidt and project architect Ryan Monteleagre left the plan largely alone and set about adding sculptural furnishings and custom details as artful as the contemporary canvases on the walls. The scheme also took cues from the curve of the building’s exterior curtain wall. Kleinschmidt and Monteleagre extrapolated on that sinuous line, using it as an organizing principle in the living room’s fluid layout, further referencing it in the seductive sweep of a Vladimir Kagan sofa.

To break the living room into three contiguous zones without separating them entirely, the designers installed a less-than-full-height partition, in eye-catching royal-purple, between sitting areas. Another screen, this one perforated, sections off the dining nook, where floor-to-ceiling windows afford views of the sunset. Should the owners want to take in that sight from the comfort of the sofa, however, the screen simply folds away. 

> See more from the Spring 2017 issue of Interior Design Homes