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In Manhattan, the most densely populated borough of the most populated US city, where superprime properties stretch past $5,000 per square foot, Eric Brown’s young sons can ride their bicycles around the living room. Their apartment is in a converted warehouse in Tribeca, the city’s once-industrial heartland and now the site of some of its most in-demand homes. Living in a more-than-100-year-old factory building feels “inspirational”, says Brown, and it’s not only about the cycling space.

“It’s a piece of New York history, with wooden beams and steel bracing that has been utilised for dozens of different purposes over time,” says Brown, co-founder of real-estate agency Elevated Advisement. “I can see scuffs on the columns and marks where an artist threw in a nail to hang his canvas. It’s the definition of character. There are former spice warehouses where you can still smell the cinnamon in the beams.” He recently sold a seven-bedroom, single-floor loft in a former wrapping-paper factory, designed by Albert Wagner in 1887, with an asking price of $17mn.

The evolution of industrial buildings into multimillion-pound luxury homes was a slow burn. For architect Mike Stiff, co-founder of Stiff + Trevillion, Andy Warhol and his 1960s New York studio and social club The Factory were the “genesis” of the trend. By the late 20th century, loft living had become shorthand for an avant-garde lifestyle. Think of Glenn Close’s gritty Meatpacking District loft in Fatal Attraction; the flat instantly marked out her character as a modern urbanite flirting with danger, compared with the bourgeois “family man” played by Michael Douglas. 

“It’s the old story,” says Brown. “Artists moved in, it became a cool place and prices rose. Today you have artists who bought lofts for $30,000 in the ’60s living next door to $15mn homes. It’s a crazy juxtaposition.” The same narrative is playing out from London – where a five-bedroom duplex apartment at Chelsea Powerhouse, in the former Lots Road Power Station, is for sale at £5.25mn – to Sydney. Putting a price on the premium an industrial history commands, however, is “impossible”, says Simon Boulton, a partner in Knight Frank’s Prime Residential Sales, because each building is so unique; “each one has a story”. 

In Berlin, “buyers still see the industrial architecture as a reflection of the city’s identity and want something spacious and individual, but they also want high-quality bathrooms and kitchens, underfloor heating and top-level finishes,” says Aiane Linden, managing director at Engel & Völkers (E&V) Berlin. 

Artists who bought lofts for $30,000 in the ’60s are next door to $15mn homes

While industrial buildings in most major cities tend to cluster in specific areas – Tribeca and SoHo in New York; Shoreditch and Clerkenwell in London – in Berlin they are dispersed within residential neighbourhoods. Conversions are thus spread across prime neighbourhoods. E&V currently has two for sale. Haus Lademann in Mitte is an 1870s listed brick building that once housed a hardware business, where a triplex apartment is now priced at €2.95mn. In Prenzlauer Berg, an apartment in a former button factory (€425,000) has Prussian cap ceilings and exposed steel beams. 

As well as square footage, sustainability is a plus. Adaptive reuse of existing buildings is acknowledged by the World Economic Forum as a “powerful strategy to reduce waste and cut emissions”. Renovating an existing building emits 50-75 per cent less carbon than constructing the same building anew, while diverting up to 90 per cent of materials from landfill. 

“When these conversions were first done [in the ’60s and ’70s], people didn’t consider embodied carbon, but thinking about the efficiency of the building is now an important part of the puzzle,” says Becca Roderick, interior design executive director at Morris Adjmi Architects. The firm has just unveiled 67 Irving Place, a Gramercy Park transformation of a former printing works into 11 luxury apartments, priced from $7.1mn. 

Repurposing existing buildings is the USP of London-based Stiff + Trevillion. Its headquarters are housed in a converted wallpaper factory, while co-founder Stiff owns a property in a former Christmas decoration factory. The practice’s focus on “putting the existing fabric first” answers eco-conscious concerns – but also aesthetic ones. “I couldn’t live in a half-timbered Cotswolds cottage,” says Stiff. “I like living in a building with heritage that feels part of the fabric of the city.” 

In 2024, he moved into an apartment at Manifattura Tabacchi, a 1930s former tobacco factory in Florence, where one- to three-bedroom properties are priced between €356,000 and €786,000 through Savills. “It has a good balance between industrial design and contemporary insertions, Tuscan terracotta tiles and chestnut beams alongside steel, concrete and glass,” says Stiff. 

London architectural interior design firm Echlin’s approach to The Dairy – a development of eight apartments in an 1860s building in Notting Hill, coming to market next month priced from £1.7mn – is to “elevate the classic hallmarks of Crittall windows, metallic elements and raw timber, to make them more elegant and refined”, says creative director Samuel Pye. “We have to embrace the features, whether that’s beams and metal columns or historic cogs, hooks and winches.”

Getting the balance between old and new right can prove financially advantageous, as interior and theatre set designer Brett Mickan and his husband Nick English discovered when they took on a floor of a former dye factory in Sydney’s Surry Hills. “The challenge was irresistible to me,” says Mickan of the space that was originally converted to residential in the 1980s. The couple bought the property in 2019 for less than A$1mn (about £529,000), spent around £400,000 on renovations and sold it for more than £1.5mn last year. 

A new offering in the Australian capital raises the bar further. Pigeon Shed, a 1914 warehouse converted in 2018 by MCK Architects, features a triple-height entrance foyer and guest bedroom hidden behind wooden shelving, and is for sale at A$15mn (about £8mn) through Bresic Whitney. 

Before Mickan and English sold their home, they took full advantage of an aspect of loft life that Warhol made legendary. They packed 150 guests into the property for a “farewell to the factory” party. The loft might be ever more luxe, but it hasn’t lost its cool. 

If you look at the careers of successful modernist architects, often, somewhere right near the beginning, you will find a house commissioned by their parents. It helps in establishing an architectural practice to have a well-to-do family. 

This was certainly the case for Patrick Gwynne, whose most famous house, The Homewood in Esher, Surrey, was built for his parents in 1938 when he was 24 years old. Elevated on piloti, the slender columns popularised by Le Corbusier in his early villas, it was an attenuated strip of white on one side, glass on the other. A blast of modernism in the London suburbs, it looked scandalously continental. One of only two modernist houses owned by the National Trust (along with Ernő Goldfinger’s Hampstead home, 2 Willow Road), it is a monument to one of the most prolific British architects of his era, and yet his name is rarely cited as an influence. For most, Gwynne remains a marginal figure, never quite recognised by the establishment despite his commercial success, and frequently dismissed as a bit of a stylist.  

Frankly, I’ve always been a little resistant myself. Gwynne’s work has often seemed a somewhat pale reflection of European modernism – its California cool looked underpowered beneath grey suburban British skies. But a visit to one of his London houses has begun to change my mind. Beechworth Close in Hampstead was built in 1961 for Max and Anne Bruh. The couple had fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and acquired a struggling fashion brand, Frank Usher; offering a budget take on runway and a shot of glamour in postwar-austerity Britain, it flourished. 

Their home is situated at the end of a long private road (once a country lane through Hampstead Heath but currently a churned-up building site of oversized, under-construction houses). It is a low-slung, stripped-down and modest affair that has recently been restored by a new owner (a property developer who prefers not to be named) and the interior designer Iwan Halstead of Daytrip Studio.

“It must have felt incredibly progressive at the time, particularly in the way it supports family life,” says Halstead. “There is a real sense of openness and generosity to the spaces. The timber panelling, terrazzo and expansive glazing capture the optimism of the period.” 

Gwynne (1913-2003) looked severe in a buttoned-up English kind of way, and this house looks austere from the outside, too. But he always designed his homes with entertaining in mind. Hence the large living room, which spans the width of the property and seems to be floating in a forest. With a mossy California-esque landscape to one side and a more Nordic treeline on the other, there is no sense you are in London at all. It’s an amazing, open space. 

He designed all the interiors, the wall finishes. He wanted to design a total work of art

To one side, up a few steps, the raised dining area is defined by an intriguing glass room-divider and cabinet finished in green marble and brass studwork. The back wall flaunts a Chinese-style mural of calligraphy supergraphics and golden painted bamboo procured by Gwynne. Seating spans a long, low ledge by the fireplace and an angled built-in sofa designed by Daytrip, while the room appears to continue outside onto a terrace beneath a deep overhang. Anne Bruh, interviewed in Woman and Beauty magazine in 1961, said: “It has everything we ever dreamed of – chequerboard terrazzo floors, window-walls and a vast garden with even a pond and weeping willow tree.” 

It is a house both very much of its era yet somehow very now. Sure, midcentury might have become a victim of its own success, almost a cliché, but certain aspects of this house look remarkably contemporary. The kitchen is compact, practical and seductive. Like most of Gwynne’s designs, it has an island unit (almost unheard of in ’60s Britain), rich wood veneers and vividly colourful tiled walls. The toplit stairwell with its exquisite floating treads and sculptural, curving handrail is beautifully done, while the master bedroom is surrounded on three sides by its sylvan setting. 

Gwynne kicked off his career in the office of the dashing, matinee-idol architect Wells Coates (1895-1958). Coates, an expatriate Canadian, was one of the first real modernists in the UK, and in the late 1920s designed the concrete Lawn Road Flats (aka the Isokon Building) in Belsize Park. It was Gwynne’s first major project, and what a place to start. The minimal apartment block became famous for its residents: a mix of radicals, writers, architects and spies. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and his colleague Marcel Breuer lived there, as did Agatha Christie. 

Also working with Coates was Denys Lasdun, who went on to design the National Theatre, and with whom Gwynne would remain lifelong friends. Neil Bingham, former architecture curator at the V&A who wrote a monograph on Gwynne, also knew the architect well. “He had the driest sense of humour,” says Bingham. “He was gay, of course, but he would never come out. Unlike most architects of the era, he designed all the interiors, all the wall finishes. He wanted to design a total work of art. As a result he was dismissed by the establishment as a gay interior decorator who also did architecture.” 

In his own practice, Gwynne stuck steadfastly to individual houses – many of which survive. Near Angmering on the Sussex coast, the 1970 Vista Point resembles a midcentury cocktail cabinet, with a pool like an abstract artwork. In 2012 you could have bought it for less than a million; it’s now available for holiday stays. His wonderful boomerang-shaped house on Rotherfield Road, Henley-on-Thames, meanwhile, was sold in 2023 by The Modern House (with a listing price of £2mn). 

Gwynne’s houses had a Californian expansiveness that was decidedly un-English. They were party palaces, with sprung wooden floors for dancing, large reception areas and moveable furniture. Maybe that’s why film stars of the day were drawn to them. Gwynne built a house in Bournemouth for Jack Hawkins, then one of the most ubiquitous actors on the British screen; for the glamorous Laurence Harvey, he designed a large London conversion that the Lithuanian-born movie star filled with antiques and a huge four-poster bed, much to Gwynne’s annoyance.

There is a sense of openness and generosity to the spaces

 Along the way, Gwynne developed a nice sideline in restaurants and cafés. He designed the Crescent Restaurant at the Festival of Britain in Battersea Park in 1951. The vast, frilly circus of a building was a rainbow spectrum of colour, with barber-shop-striped support poles and tent-like pavilions; it didn’t help endear him to the modernist establishment but it did help him win a lucrative bunch of commissions from its operator, Charles Forte. These included Motorchef service stations, all now gone.

His wonderful Serpentine Restaurant in Kensington Gardens, with its cantilevered deck and glass pavilions that looked like terrariums, was shamefully demolished in the 1990s. The less dramatic but still-fun Dell restaurant on the other end of the lake survives. As does his extension to the York Theatre Royal; its slender concrete columns flaring into an almost gothic arrangement of vaulting remains impressive.

Gwynne remained a “confirmed bachelor”. There are photos of him at Hollywood parties, clearly in his element, with Joan Collins and Michael Caine. He would arrive in a Rolls-Royce. He adored fast cars; in later life he would be seen whizzing around in a sleek Aston Martin.

He loved tech too. His houses were full of gizmos and gadgets: built-in hi-fi systems, TVs that suddenly appeared. It’s all a bit James Bond. At Beechworth Close, the owner shows me his study. It’s an intimate room with one wall lined in rich veneer and a large window onto the landscape, but I can’t help noticing that it lacks a desk. Then he pulls down a long hinged surface from the veneered wall and it locks into place as a slender, elegant tabletop. The balance of the more-than-60-year-old mechanism is perfect. Weightless. “The irony,” says Bingham, talking about the careful restoration and laughing, “is that Gwynne would have wanted to rip it all out and start anew.”

Gwynne may not have been a radical innovator. He designed no social housing and few large-scale public buildings. His influence beyond the UK may well have been zero. But the buildings that survive have modernity and intelligence. With their flat roofs and glazed walls, sitting curiously between California and the Côte d’Azur, they are gorgeous houses for modest stars.