Project Name: Purple Brand Operations Studio

Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Design Team: Scott & Scott Architects

Floor Area: 1,300 m²

Completion: 2025

Photography: Andrew Latreille

Design Features: Scott & Scott Architects has transformed a 1973 warehouse in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant industrial district into a working studio for denim label Purple Brand, delivering a 1,300-square-metre interior that channels the brand’s affinity for raw materiality and utilitarian precision. The space accommodates operations, design, archives, sample storage, photography, and meeting areas within a single, continuously functioning atelier.

The design’s defining gesture is one of restraint. The original building shell is preserved in its entirety, with newly cast concrete tables and a central stair emerging directly from the existing patinated floor structure. Rather than concealing the warehouse’s industrial history, the intervention extends it, establishing a material continuity between what was found and what was made. The central stair, cut into the precast concrete floor, serves as both a circulation element and a spatial connector, binding the two levels into a coherent working sequence.

This logic carries through every material decision. Pigmented plywood furniture and stainless steel rails organise samples and working collections within immediate reach. Above, galvanised plank grating integrates services, acoustic panels, and indirect lighting while leaving the original timber plank roofing legible and intact. All materials are deployed in raw or pigmented states, chosen for durability and intended to develop further character through use over time.

The approach mirrors Purple Brand’s own design philosophy, which draws on vintage and utilitarian references as the foundation of its denim collections. Here, the studio environment becomes a direct material expression of the brand itself. Scott & Scott Architects demonstrate how adaptive reuse, when grounded in material honesty and programmatic clarity, can produce a workspace that is both rigorously functional and quietly compelling.

Design Team: Scott & Scott Architects is a Vancouver-based architecture and interior design practice founded in 2012 by Susan and David Scott, following twelve years of combined experience at leading west coast architectural firms. Both graduates of Dalhousie University’s School of Architecture, the founding principals established the studio with a commitment to technically rigorous design practice across residential, commercial, and adaptive reuse typologies. The firm operates an in-house workshop dedicated to industrial design, material research, and prototyping, enabling direct involvement across all stages of design and construction. Lead architect Andrea Zittlau works alongside the founding principals on the studio’s current project portfolio.

The practice has built a distinctive body of work grounded in material honesty, tectonic precision, and an attentiveness to the inherent qualities of place and programme. Characteristic to the firm’s approach is the use of regionally sourced and durability-driven materials deployed in raw or minimally treated states, producing interiors and buildings that evolve in character through sustained use. Projects range in scale from ground-up residences and alpine cabins to urban warehouse conversions and commercial fit-outs.

The firm was awarded the Young Architect Award by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada in 2016 and was recognised as an Emerging Voices recipient by the Architectural League of New York in 2017, affirming its position as one of Canada’s most rigorous and quietly influential contemporary practices.