Overview
An old warehouse reimagined as a creative studio without erasing its working past.
Location
Pasar Baru, Jakarta
Area
900 m²
Scope
Adaptive reuse, FF&E
Year
2023
The brief
Keeping the working past
The warehouse had spent sixty years storing paper. The instinct with a building like this is to clean it until the history is gone.
We resisted. The floor keeps its stains, the trusses keep their paint, and the new work — studios, a gallery, a small café — is inserted as clearly modern objects that never pretend to be original.
Materials and finish
Keeping the working past
The brick was cleaned, not rendered. The steel trusses were stripped back and waxed rather than painted out. Where the old fabric was too far gone, we inserted new timber elements that are obviously new — pale, square-edged, and set slightly proud, so the repair reads as a repair.
The new floor is a polished screed that stops short of the walls, leaving a shallow channel of the original slab exposed around the perimeter. It is a small move and it does the most work in the building: you always know which part is 1961 and which part is ours.
