our renovation story

It all started with a dream...
Haha, as cheesy as it sounds, it's true!

We have been friends since high school, and when inherited a little bit of money from a family friend, we pooled our strengths and passions and decided to open Urbanitas.


The search began for the perfect building to call home, and we had to choose very carefully because we didn't have that much money to spend. We ended up finding this less than beautiful, abandoned storehouse in Richmond, Virginia.

From the outside, we were a little concerned about getting it up to standard, and the inside was equally as rough. Luckily, we could see it had great bones and we decided to buy it ♥

From a pure stroke of luck, when we bought the building, the previous owner had the original blueprints as well as a picture he gave to us of the storehouse not long after it was built:

It was really cool to see what it looked like in the past, and it gave us something to shoot for. We asked around town to see if anyone knew about the building when it was new, and they helped us to learn that it would have looked a little like this:
{ignore our bad photoshop please}

Much better in color, isn't it? So needless to say, with the plans and a direction we turned the floor over to Sophie, who is the better architect / designer out of the three of us!

DESIGN / SOPHIE

 Here are some {crappy} pictures we took the day we bought the building:

First, I drew up the plan with these guys to fit in what we needed, in our 60' x 45' storehouse:

We went over these with our architect / designer / contractor to make up some final blueprints and then work began!

One month later, we have a beautiful store that you will have to see to believe ♥