When the merchant Dorilus Morrison visited Minneapolis in 1854, he was so impressed by the newly platted frontier outpost’s potential that he sold his businesses in Maine and moved west within the year. In the late 2010s, the city similarly dazzled an executive and artist pondering their retirement. Picturing nights out at the Guthrie Theater and salon-style conversations at home, the husband and wife tapped local firm PKA Architecture to renovate a loft in the flour mill that Morrison had opened in Minneapolis’s burgeoning downtown in 1879.

Morrison’s Standard Mill was converted to a hotel in 1987 and again to condominiums in 2007. Yet the condo that would ultimately belong to the retirees had remained vacant since the building’s hospitality years. “It was so peppered with random columns and HVAC systems that it seemed too difficult to work with,” architect Brent Nelson, PKA’s director of development, explains of the space’s persistent emptiness. Such idiosyncrasies didn’t faze this client who, Nelson adds, “had specific goals in mind, foremost among them celebrating the existing structure.” PKA cleaned the brick walls and coated exposed steel columns in intumescent paint; the firm also employed a complementary wood-planked dropped ceiling for fire and acoustical separation.

Other client goals demanded modifications to the visible historic fabric. Because the homeowners had previously lived in a large single-family home and wondered where they would keep the things packed in their suburban basement, PKA inserted a mezzanine within the 18-foot-tall interior so closets could be tucked beneath it. The mezzanine hems to the southern and western halves of the plan, farthest from the arched windows that look north and east to the Mississippi River. The design team also divided the steel deck into two zones connected by a bridge, so the parts could flank a 4-foot-wide entry corridor that it aligned to an east-facing window.

Two mechanical rooms, an art studio, and a guest bedroom are located on the mezzanine level, while underneath it PKA created two more guest suites, exercise and laundry spaces, and a walnut-paneled den in addition to the storage. “With all the height, there was opportunity to add both function and drama—compression makes the large spaces feel even more special and airy,” Nelson says of the intervention. PKA consulted with the structural engineer who had overseen the Standard Mill’s hotel conversion to weld decking to the existing irregular column grid.

Nelson notes that common functions and the primary bedroom were naturally going to occupy the soaring space along the windows, to take greatest advantage of river views. Their specific arrangement did not come into sharp focus until the artist-homeowner mentioned that she would miss her suburban yard and patio. This prompted PKA to propose a solarium around which it organized the other rooms. Today the solarium is sandwiched between the bedroom at the interior’s northern terminus and the kitchen, which looks into it from the south. The other semi-public rooms unfold southward from the kitchen, and Nelson credits the interior patio for “more clearly separating the primary living space from the bedroom.”

While the client had envisioned a simple, sunny spot for houseplants, both husband and wife embraced the solarium idea as their own—in part because it evoked the winter gardens that they had visited on travels through England. In response, PKA enclosed the solarium in glass-and-steel interior walls modeled after London’s Crystal Palace, and it fabricated those elements in collaboration with local artisans like Hennepin Made. And while Nelson admits that he doesn’t quite know how the solarium “fits into the design zeitgeist,” perhaps it is foremost a reflection of the homeowners themselves—celebrating their past experiences, as well as those awaiting them in Minneapolis.