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Domino Reno: Before + Afters, DIYs, and Advice From the Pros
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Lizz Wasserman wants you to get to know Milwaukee. As a creative executive who grew up in the Wisconsin hub, she doesn’t mind being its unofficial ambassador. “Milwaukee is wonderfully weird in a way that big cities just aren’t,” she says.
Wasserman met Adam Loeb, the in-house director for the New York Times T Brand, when they were college students in Madison. And she jokes that her husband Isaac Resnikoff, who runs an architectural firm in L.A. called Project Room, “married in” to this city’s love of festivals, community, and a fun bar scene that won’t blow your budget. “The three of us have been close for a long time, and during the pandemic, we fantasized about travel,” she remembers. They lamented the ways in which short-term rentals didn’t capture the spirit of their beloved Milwaukee, and so they set about creating a place that did. Enter: The Lake Effect Club.
Over the course of 10 months, the trio transformed a dilapidated 150-year-old property on Brady Street into a destination with three distinct apartments: The Hoan, The Nohl, and The Sidney. The Lake Effect Club opened last fall as a love letter to Milwaukee—a way for Wasserman to showcase the bold perspective a place can have when it’s off the beaten path. Here’s an inside look behind the scenes of the reno.
Paint for Instant Personality
As is the case with countless longstanding Midwestern buildings, this one had wood paneling in the largest unit (the Sidney). Wasserman knew that the easiest and perhaps most commonplace solution would be to revert the walls back to a blank canvas, but she didn’t want to go that route. Instead, she drenched every room from the floor to the ceiling in a bold paint color…