Today I'm starting this new series: Vintage Sapique. During a sunday walk over 9 years ago my husband and I came across – and fell in love with – this great industrial building from the 60s. It was abandoned and previously housed a chemical factory with laboratories and offices. We immediately knew we wanted to save it from destruction.
But how? There was no running water, no electricity, no heating and it wasn't for sale. After 7 years of patience, hard work, lots of helping hands, blood-sweat-and-tears, our house is now "photoshoot proof". In october 2011 Studio Sapique was featured on Design*Sponge and later this year it will appear in a global publication. But most of all, it became our home.
Somehow I find it difficult to watch pictures from "before", as I only see the enormous amount of work we carried out to make it into what it is today. Sometimes it's better not to know everything beforehand, because I think we might not have started this incredible project 7 years ago…
So what to expect? I will be taking new fresh pictures in & around the house while showing you little bits of what Studio Sapique looked like before. I hope you'll join me on this little adventure?
To give Vintage Sapique a proper start, I should tell you more about the origin of the name. People from around this area (just outside Paris), know our house by the Sapic factory. Sapic is the abbreviation of Société d'Application de Procédés Industriels et Chimiques (Company for the Application of Industrial and Chemical Procedures). I absolutely loved the original logo with the two retort flasks and simple type. As we're located on a quay, we transformed the name into Sapique. It became a little wordplay in French: "ça pique" means "it stings". So we even recycled the name & logo!
Great idea for a series, Judith. Seven years will give you lots of material to blog about! I look forward to learning more about your amazing space and how you transformed it.
And how awesome is a house with its own logo?!
I LOVE to follow this photo journey, it looks amazing. The logo and name fit exactly. Seven years seem awful long, but we've been renovating our 1920's home for five years now, and there is so much to do when you want to do things yourselves.
Well, thanks for sharing your story here!
Looks amazing! Can't wait to see your home unravel!
Very excited to share this with all of you. Thanks for the support!