A designer and an architect, in partnership.

We met in 2014 at a Storefront for Art and Architecture opening. By 2018 we were partners — professional first, romantic second.

Half Design

Anika, designer.

Anika Patel grew up between Mumbai and London. She studied design at Central Saint Martins, then spent seven years at Wallpaper* magazine as an art director — 2008 through 2015 — working on interiors and architecture features. She moved to Brooklyn in 2010 and made the trans-Atlantic commute work until 2015, when she left to start her own studio.

Patel Studio operates from a small office above the Foundry's mezzanine. The practice does interior architecture and brand identity for restaurants, retail, and a small list of cultural clients. The Foundry is its largest project to date and the only one in its portfolio that is also its address.

Anika is the eye on the room. She picks the chairs, the linens, the floral palette. She has opinions about ceremony floor plans. She does not have opinions about the cake.

She is the one who decided the building's signature color would be vermilion — the deep red-orange of the bricks visible through the original eastern window — and that the venue's signature wedding-flower accent would be the vermilion ranunculus.

Half Architecture

Tobias, architect.

Tobias Okafor grew up in Lagos. He studied architecture at Yale, class of 2007. He spent five years at OMA — Rem Koolhaas's New York office — 2007 through 2012, working on the cultural-institution end of the practice. He started his own studio in 2013 and has run it since.

Okafor Architecture is a four-person practice that does adaptive-reuse and small institutional work. It has projects in New York, New Haven, and Lagos. Its design ethic is restraint — taking away rather than adding, preserving rather than restoring, intervening only where intervention is necessary.

The Foundry's renovation is the practice's most visible work. Tobias designed the rooftop addition, the mezzanine railing restoration, the HVAC routing that hides the ductwork inside the original truss bays, and the ADA elevator that occupies what used to be a sand-storage closet.

He is also the one who knows what the building's freight elevators weigh and why the load specification matters when a band shows up with a grand piano.

Two Years of Renovation

The Foundry, 2018–2020.

The building was put up in 1908 by the Industrial Foundry & Brass Works as one of seven cast-iron foundries that operated along Wyckoff Avenue between 1898 and 1979. The original architectural patents are still stamped into the metal of the freight elevators and into the base of each of the four columns at the center of the main floor. The patents are dated June 4, 1908. The columns themselves were poured in Pittsburgh.

The foundry closed in 1979. The building sat vacant for thirty-eight years — through the city's worst Bushwick decades, through the slow gentrification of the early 2010s, through three change-of-ownership rumors that never materialized. In 2017 the building appeared on the Department of Buildings demolition list with a Class 2 listing. We saw the listing in a Brownstoner article in March 2018 and started inquiring that week.

We acquired it in October 2018. We spent the next two years on the renovation. The principles were strict: preserve the original cast-iron columns. Preserve the polished-concrete floor with the foundry-era patches. Add the minimum new architecture necessary for HVAC, electric, plumbing, ADA access, and rooftop access. Add nothing else.

The renovation finished in April 2020. We had planned a May 2020 opening. The pandemic deferred us six months. We opened in October 2020 with our first wedding — a small affair, twenty-eight guests — on October 17th.

The renovation is documented in detail in our journal. The short version is that the building wanted to be a venue. We did not have to argue with it.

Today

Today.

The Foundry hosts forty-two weddings a year. We could host more. We choose not to. The corporate-events program runs Monday through Friday — about thirty events a year — and the art installations run four times a year, occupying the gallery for two weeks at a time.

We live in the apartment Tobias designed above the Mezzanine. Our daughter — five years old in 2026 — sometimes runs through gallery openings in her socks. She knows the names of the four columns.

We host every venue tour personally. We answer the inquiry email ourselves. We do not have a sales team, because we are the sales team. This is by choice.

We do not say "industrial chic." We say "cast iron and concrete." The first phrase is a marketing term. The second describes what is actually here.