August 2011. Lofted Over Lafayette: For accommodation with style, substance and location, Buchanan Lofts lead the way.

Leah Simon would like you to know her hometown better. “I would like the broader community to know that Lafayette has more to offer than just Festival International [de Louisiane] or a crawfish boil,” she says. “It’s got a super rich cultural scene for a city its size.” Simon should know. The Lafayette native divides her time between Louisiana, where she owns Tsunami sushi, and the other L.A., where she built a career as an “artists & repertoire” record executive over the course of twenty years. A serial entrepreneur, Simon has a slew of other enterprises we could talk about, but for the purposes of this story let’s just focus on her latest—a complex of chic, urban, loft-style dwellings that shoehorns a heady dose of high design into a former department store building, then makes it available to folks in search of short-term lodgings and weekend getaways. Sleek, ingeniously designed and spectacularly appointed, the living spaces at Buchanan Lofts wouldn’t be out of place in West Hollywood. But like their owner they bridge both worlds, and succeed in being right at home in downtown Lafayette.

“It’s a downtown warehouse space, converted into a modern property lodging,” explains Simon. Remembered by old Lafayette hands as Abdalla’s Department Store, the ground floor at 410 Buchanan Street had been home to things as diverse as a feed store, a coffee mill and a hip hop club before Simon and her sister, Michele Ezell, began to see something different. “Upstairs, it had been unoccupied for twenty-five years,” Simon explained. “There was a fur locker, mannequins; other stuff left over from the Abdalla’s days. First we thought of condos, or maybe a big roller rink …”

The lofts idea came later, ushered into existence via the fertile imagination of Jim Sullivan, associate professor in the LSU School of Architecture. Sullivan and Simon have collaborated on a number of projects including a penthouse loft also in Lafayette, and the dramatic renovation of Simon’s mid-century modern house on Baton Rouge’s Whitehaven Boulevard. “Jim is amazing; what he can do with space,” said Simon, and the eight units at Buchanan Lofts prove it.

Ranging in size from a 580-square-foot studio to an 1100-foot loft complete with spiral stair and mezzanine sleeping level, the spaces are all variations on a theme. “I’d describe it as minimalist boxes in a rough, unfinished warehouse,” explained Sullivan. “So one can see in each unit rectangular volumes that house the sleeping areas, lofts and bathrooms, while also seeing the original brick walls, metal ceilings and wood floors.”

Each unit has a look, feel, floorplan and set of design elements to make it unique, although the orientations differ. Ingeniously, Sullivan’s designs imbue these spaces with an expansive sense of volume, and utilize the building’s soaring roof heights to accentuate the sense of having room to luxuriate. It made a great palette, he says, explaining that he loved “…the raw material and the spatial quality of the building. It has great materials—the brick, wood floors and steel columns, and great tall spaces.”

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