Housing is growing increasingly scarce in cities around the world. With populations rapidly urbanizing, creative solutions are almost always required (especially in the form of plentiful affordable options), but that still doesn’t mean they should resort to erasing local color, culture, and heritage. Converting historic industrial architecture to multi-family residences is a much more respectful way to approach the problem.

?Monka Apartments? offers a beautiful example of this process in the medieval town center of Torún, Poland, which has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A centuries-old Gothic granary with beautiful bones offered an interesting possibility for conversion to housing, but its layout presented a few challenges. Originally designed with industrial usage in mind, the building features numerous large round-topped windows through which sacks of grain were once moved in and out of each level, but the ceilings are low, and the internal rooms lack access to natural light altogether.
Architect Pawel Tatara teamed up with the firm Znamy Sie to design nine new apartments on the second, third, and fourth levels of the building, with the ground floor being occupied by Monka Restaurant. The two knew they wanted to preserve as much of the historical structure as possible, with minimal modern interventions being made, but the client wanted the residences to have a bright, airy, and decidedly more contemporary feel.

Many de...