A loft with room for inspiration

Leafing through a 1960s shelter magazine recently, Linnea Gits landed on a piece about shibumi, a Japanese aesthetic. She tacked a list of its seven qualities to the chunky cork mood board inside the River West loft she shares with partner Peter Dunham, as a distillation of the values they have always lived and designed by: simplicity, implicitness, modesty, silence, naturalness, everydayness and imperfection.

Those principles influence every object — custom furniture, tabletop accessories, limited-edition prints — that the couple create for their almost 2-year-old design company Uusi. That sensibility also permeates the 2,500-square-foot live/work space that they gutted and rebuilt starting in 1996, in an industrial building once occupied by a furniture company.

A woodworker and furniture-maker, Dunham executed most of the rehab, with artful unconventionality. There is no living room, formal or otherwise. "One of these days we will get a sofa," Gits said with a laugh. The master bedroom occupies a sliver of the 2,500 square feet of second-floor space they lease, which affords a sprawling art studio and corner office. Dunham's wood shop stretches across 5,000 square feet in the basement.

Nonetheless, the interior feels warm and inviting in its cross between commercial and personal, spare and collected.

"Spaces are so emotional," said Gits, who focuses on graphic art, design and illustration. "They are sanctuaries, but they need enough tension to be inspirational."

"They also need to be functional," Dunham said, seated at the dark wood dining/conference table he built and topped with white laminate, both for appealing contrast and a neutral background for product photography.

Uusi — pronounced OO-see — means "new" in Finnish. But much of the freshness here comes from the couple's vintage objects. An edited selection of Springerle cookie molds dating to the 1800s (which they have baked with) and Japanese Kokeshi dolls adorn floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Another holds Danish craftsman Kay Bojesen's bulbous wood animals, some of which Gits' mother gave to her as a child. They informed a series of decorative wood animal figures Uusi produced for Design Within Reach stores.

"As a child, I never wanted to play with the (Bojesen figurines), but I liked looking at them and imagining what world they were from," Gits said. "It's those things that are so crazy-weird that feed you and stick with you longer."

"They start something," Dunham said.

Painted Benjamin Moore Atrium white, original plaster walls adjoin new drywall where rooms were reconfigured. The floors are plywood transformed with custom finishes. Dunham stained the kitchen ones white, suggesting marble when sunshine floods through two skylights.

Above the kitchen sink is a wooden, wall-mounted knife block, an Uusi best-seller (and one purchased by Alinea chef Grant Achatz). "It's an example of something that looks so simple to make," Dunham said, but isn't.

Dunham and Gits remodeled the kitchen three years ago, replacing cabinetry above the counter with a long shelf for easy access to dinnerware and Dunham's vintage Belgian beer glasses. They kept the Tappan stove, inherited from Dunham's grandmother.

The shelf, and the lower cabinetry, bears a thick veneer of cypress, from staves Dunham salvaged from water towers across Chicago. The rings of the wood repeat along the shelf and lower cabinetry like the eddies of a pond across which a stone has skipped.

"This wood is anywhere from 300 to a thousand years old," Dunham said. "It's like some kind of fossil gem. You cut into these pieces, and you never know what you're going to see."

He has re-purposed cypress and redwood staves for commercial and personal purposes. Most recently, he shaped a paper-thin flitch into a lampshade that bathes his desk in warm, coppery light if he is working in the wee hours, as the couple are wont and able to do.

They do sleep, Gits assured. A full-size bed covered in a Missoni spread accommodates Gits (who is 5 feet 10 inches tall), Dunham and occasionally their two cats.

"Four years ago we were replacing our mattress, and I was so freaked by how big they had gotten, with 5 miles of pillow top. We just wanted a firm mattress. The store had purposely put this one on a Soviet-era bed," Gits said, smiling. "We're going to sound really Spartan! We're not unsensual people."