Signature House began not on an empty site but inside an existing and only partially documented industrial structure. Before any design decision could be made, the building’s own construction history had to be reconstructed from newspaper archives, historical photographs and surviving business documents.

What emerged was a biography. The complex started in the 1860s as the A. Wolfschmidt distillery, where Riga Black Balsam was produced, became the Rīgas Raugs yeast factory, and finally the Rosme sewing factory, whose expansion gave the building the form it has today. It has stood empty since that factory closed. The fabric is a patchwork of at least three construction periods, with no single unified architecture to restore.

Demand was tested against eleven modern residential complexes across Riga. The analysis revealed a consistent split in the market. New-build developments compete on servicing, underground parking for every unit, energy piles, heat-recovery ventilation, building management systems. Renovated historic buildings cannot match that provision and win instead on authenticity, preserved detail and a central address. This defined precisely where Signature House could compete and where it could not.

Three buyer segments emerged—families looking for multi-room, storage-rich apartments; mobile professionals wanting small, fully finished turnkey units; and investors focused on liquid studios and one-bedrooms. Two distinct brand narratives were drafted and tested against these segments, one built around the calm of the Quiet Centre and the park opposite, the other around the site’s industrial origin story.

Four constraints followed from this work. The building has no single original design to return to. A converted factory shell cannot match new-build parking ratios or layout flexibility. Two buyer profiles had to be served within one building without compromising either one’s servicing needs, from storage to stroller and bicycle parking to entrances. And two viable narratives had to be reconciled into one coherent language rather than resolved by choosing between them.

The product was defined accordingly. Apartment types are zoned by block rather than mixed unpredictably within one core, so family and rental formats each keep their own servicing logic. Delivery is structured in two formats per type, white-box or fully packaged, which widens the addressable buyer set without fragmenting the product. The current programme stands at 89 apartments with three ground-floor commercial premises.

The concept that followed treats the building’s layered history as its subject rather than a problem to be resolved. Instead of restoring Signature House to a single authentic appearance it never had, the facade concept holds both registers at once—the burnt brick, brickwork and steel of the 19th-century industrial site, and the Mid-Century Modern vocabulary of the volume that gives the building its present form. A ventilated ceramic facade system, a reference to the fired ceramic bottles of Riga Black Balsam once produced here, carries that material identity forward without literally restoring a facade that never existed in a single unified form. The two brand narratives are reconciled in the material rather than settled by choosing one.