Signature pieces and leftover materials from the late founder’s namesake furniture company cohabitated with him, his wife, and their three children in the same building where the line was manufactured.
Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the December 2001 issue.
The Heltzers of Ravenswood, Chicago, have the kind of unconventional lifestyle that might belong to the characters in a John Irving novel. However, instead of residing in a ramshackle hotel or a boarding school, they live in a furniture factory.
Actually, the three-story brick building was built in the 19th century to house a candy factory, with a small orchard next door to supply homegrown cherry flavor. It is one of a string of industrial buildings, all past their prime, stretched out along a railroad line that used to carry freight but is now mostly used by commuter trains. Michael Heltzer, 40, a furniture designer and manufacturer, purchased the building from the Chicago Historical Society in 1987. When he moved in, the former orchard was a vacant lot cluttered with empty Thunderbird and MD 20/20 bottles. He camped out on the third floor and began, in a modest way, to manufacture steel, concrete, and glass tables and chairs downstairs.
Today, the Heltzer factory takes up 13,000 square feet of the building, including a basement metal shop, a first-floor wood shop, and an office that occupies half of the second floor. Finished pieces are stored in a warehouse several blocks away, and are sold through a string of showrooms, most notably one in the Chicago Merchandise Mart.
The factory building also houses a floor and a half of living space (3,400 square feet) for the Heltzers and their three children, George, Rose, and Henry, who range in age from two to seven. While urbanites across America move into lofts that are often carved out of facsimiles of industrial buildings, the Heltzers live in a real factory that is still very much a factory.
Michael Heltzer started out his professional life as a lawyer at a white-shoe New York firm, Milbank Tweed. But Heltzer, whose wardrobe favors T-shirts, worn jeans, and dust-coated clogs, was not at home on Wall Street. "I knew I was in trouble when I started picking up stuff on the street and making things at night," he recalls. Eventually, he left New York behind, moved back to his native Chicago, and started taking classes at the Chicago Art Institute, while continuing to practice law.
"A teacher from the Art Institute gave me keys to his factory," Michael continues. He spent all his spare time learning how to use vintage, prewar machine tools. "I was welding, forming, bending."
Heltzer’s first product was a glass-and-stainless-steel cafe table on a concrete pedestal. Using contacts he’d made through family and friends, he sold it directly to architects and restaurant owners. "I got 6o orders the first month," Michael says. "Then I quit the law."
Today, the Heltzer line consists of over 150 products, everything from teak-covered coat hooks (they use up the scrap wood left over from larger pieces of furniture) to wall units, all linked by a shiny, stainless-steel aesthetic.
When he moved into the old factory and began the long process of restoring it, Heltzer was single. In 1991, his girlfriend, Elizabeth, a social worker, moved in and in 1993 they were married. "When I moved in, it was Michael and two people working with him downstairs," says Elizabeth, 37. "Upstairs, it was a bedroom and an open loft space."
As soon as Michael and Elizabeth started having children, they began carving rooms out of the raw space. "Henry was born in January of ’94. We needed the space to be different, so we turned a walk-in closet off the bedroom into his room. As the business started growing, more things came upstairs."
The empty loft gradually filled up with the ever growing Heltzer line of furniture.
"This was the showroom," Elizabeth says. And she remembers the old days, when potential clients would call and say they were on their way over. She and Michael would frantically clean up the mess made by a family that was growing almost as fast as the product line.
"When Rose was born, it pushed us out of the back of the building, and we moved to the front. Then the back space was for the kids." The room in the front, which was the primary bedroom, is now dominated by a sleeper sofa and a VCR. Elizabeth calls it the "late-night movie room." Hanging over the sofa is an old black-and-white scene showing some big piece of industrial equipment at work. It looks like one of Lewis Hine’s photos of heroic factory workers, but Michael says he found it in a dumpster. Today, the parental bedroom is, once again, toward the rear of the building.
The floor immediately downstairs was rented out to tenants, and when they moved out, bedrooms for the two older kids were framed and painted down there. Then George was born and a third bedroom was added.
The style of the Heltzer furniture sets the overall tone for the living space: Room dividers and stair rails are made from woven strips of mahogany that are used in the furniture line. The bathroom is tiled with hand cut pieces of aqua slate left over from the renovation of the Chicago showroom. The prototypes for the teak hooks hang on the bathroom wall. The dining table and chairs are signature Heltzer pieces in steel, glass, and wood. One of the latest products, a glass birdbath on a concrete pedestal, is out in the garden.
Downstairs, the small, brightly painted children’s rooms surround a communal playroom that is outfitted in pure Heltzer. Stainless-steel panels were custom designed for the children so they could hang up their art projects with magnets. They have their own "work" area, where small chairs surround stainless-steel tables mounted on wheels. Michael also made a series of wooden hutches for their toys and art supplies.
On a summer afternoon, the youngest, George, can be found sprawled, bottle in mouth, on a beanbag chair in front of a Sesame Street video while his older brother and sister are at day camp. Unofficially, the play area extends into the office immediately next door, where Rose often hides under the desk of the marketing manager.
See the full story on Dwell.com: From the Archive: The Chicago Factory That Doubled as Designer Michael Heltzer’s Family Home
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