Motor City Modern Renaissance.

A LA SALLE COLLECTION ESSAY

MOTOR CITY
MODERN RENAISSANCE

How Detroit's Architecture, Grit, and Glimmer
Are Shaping a New Language for Interior Design

By Asia E. Adieh

Founder & Creative Director, La Salle Collection

Detroit  |  August 2026

Grit and Glimmer

Long before I gave it a name, I was already living inside what I now call the Motor City Modern Renaissance.

While attending Wayne State University, I spent five years working as a student intern in urban planning. The experience taught me to look at Detroit differently not only as a collection of buildings, but as a living record of ambition, decline, survival, and reinvention. Later, as president of the Pre-Law Student Association, I organized a charitable event and deliberately chose PAO in downtown Detroit as its setting.

PAO occupied the historic Michigan Oriental Theatre, which opened in 1927. Inside, the building's former life remains present: the soaring arches, dramatic staircase, traces of the original facade, and theatrical scale were not erased to create something contemporary. They were incorporated into it. An old theater had become an upscale Asian-fusion restaurant, but it had not surrendered its memory.

That evening represented what I find most compelling about Detroit: the grit and the glimmer. The city does not become modern by pretending its history never happened. Its most powerful transformations preserve the evidence of what came before and restructure it for a new purpose. That tension - between shadow and brilliance, preservation and invention, history and possibility - is the foundation of the Motor City Modern Renaissance.

Restructuring does not mean getting rid of the old. It means recognizing what still has beauty, strength, and meaning - and reincorporating it into a new use.

A City Accustomed to Becoming

Rebirth is not a new story for Detroit. It is written into the city's official motto: "We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes." The words followed the Great Fire of 1805, when almost the entire settlement was destroyed. The city rebuilt, and that cycle of loss, imagination, and reconstruction has repeated in different forms ever since.

Detroit has also long understood the power of image. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was called the Paris of the West or the Paris of the Midwest. The comparison grew from its French origins, broad radial avenues, international prominence, and extraordinary architecture. Woodward Avenue became a ceremonial spine lined by churches, theaters, hotels, department stores, offices, and apartment buildings whose original facades still speak across generations.

After dark, downtown can feel almost like an American Gotham: limestone towers disappearing into cloud, copper and brass catching the streetlight, carved figures watching from above, and layers of beauty that reveal themselves slowly. But Detroit is not a fantasy city. Its grandeur was built by industry, migration, Black cultural life, engineering, skilled trades, manufacturing, and human labor. The glimmer has always had grit beneath it.

Renaissance as Cultural Authorship

When I use the word renaissance, I do not mean a return to one historical style. I mean a period in which a place begins authoring itself again.

The Harlem Renaissance remains one of America's clearest examples of creative self-definition: artists, writers, musicians, thinkers, and communities refusing to be described solely from the outside. Detroit's present design renewal is different in history and scope, but the lesson matters. A renaissance is more than redevelopment. It requires cultural memory, intellectual confidence, beauty, and the authority to decide what the next chapter will look and feel like.

That is why the Motor City Modern Renaissance cannot be reduced to exposed brick, factory windows, or industrial nostalgia. Detroit is industrial, but it is also Art Deco, Beaux-Arts, Neo-Renaissance, midcentury modern, African American cultural history, French-influenced planning, handcrafted ceramics, automotive color, precision metalwork, and contemporary experimentation. The city's design language is not singular. Its power comes from the conversation among these inheritances.

What the Buildings Teach Us

The Guardian Building teaches that modernity does not have to be colorless. Its vaulted interiors combine geometric ornament, Pewabic and Rookwood tile, murals, glass, and Monel metal. It is disciplined and exuberant at once. The building demonstrates how craftsmanship can turn utility into ceremony.

The Fisher Building offers another lesson. Marble, mosaics, painted ceilings, brass, and bronze were not treated as decoration applied after the architecture was finished. They were part of the building's identity. Material was narrative.

Book Tower shows how restoration can support an entirely new way of living. Its historic details and grand rotunda now coexist with residences, hospitality, restaurants, gathering spaces, and contemporary amenities. The building was not frozen in time; it was invited back into civic life.

Michigan Central makes the same argument at monumental scale. Its restoration preserved and recreated intricate stone, plaster, tile, and woodwork while transforming the station into a center for technology, culture, and collaboration. The past was not retained as scenery. It became infrastructure for the future.

These buildings show why adaptive reuse is more than a development strategy. It is a design ethic: honor what carries value, repair what can be repaired, and introduce the new with enough confidence that neither era has to imitate the other.

From the City to the Interior

Motor City Modern Renaissance translates that ethic from the skyline into the room.

It may begin with architectural weight: dark walnut, warm stone, curved forms, bronze, polished metal, deeply colored velvet, tactile boucle, or a sculptural chair that holds its ground like a landmark. It welcomes contrast - raw beside refined, matte beside reflective, inherited beside newly commissioned. It understands that a room can feel cinematic without becoming theatrical, luxurious without becoming anonymous, and modern without becoming empty.

This perspective also rejects the copy-and-paste interior. Detroit's most memorable buildings were designed with point of view. Their details communicate who built them, what the city valued, and how people were meant to feel upon entering. Contemporary rooms deserve the same consideration. Personalization is not an upgrade added at the end; it is how an interior acquires identity.

That belief shaped La Salle Collection before I ever thought of describing it as a movement. I was drawn to sculptural furnishings, custom wood tones, velvet and boucle, polished gold, warm bronze, luminous silver, and pieces that could change through more than 150 combinations of fabric, color, and finish. I built a moody, black-and-gold website with cinematic movement because a bright, ordinary retail grid could not tell the story. The goal was always to create the feeling of entering a private residence whose furnishings happened to be available for purchase.

Our Design Visualization Service extends the same philosophy. A client can see selected furnishings within photographs of the room they already inhabit before making an investment. Existing architecture and meaningful possessions do not have to be discarded to make space for something new. They become part of the composition.

The New Luxury Is Memory with Purpose

The wider design world is moving toward many of the qualities Detroit has carried for generations: dark architectural woods, expressive color, ornament, patina, material contrast, craftsmanship, and rooms that feel personal rather than algorithmically perfect. But Motor City Modern Renaissance is not simply a forecast of what is fashionable in 2026. Trends may validate it; they do not define it.

Its definition comes from place. It comes from walking Woodward and noticing that the old facades still command attention. It comes from standing beneath the Guardian Building's color, entering Book Tower's restored rotunda, watching Michigan Central reopen, and gathering inside a former theater that now serves an entirely different purpose. It comes from understanding that preservation and progress are not enemies.

For residential interiors, this means creating homes that can hold both history and contemporary life. For hospitality, it means designing memorable environments that belong to their location rather than repeating the same luxury vocabulary in every city. For furniture, it means choosing pieces with enough character, craftsmanship, and adaptability to participate in a longer story.

What Rises Next

Detroit does not need to be made interesting. It needs to be read closely.

Its architecture already contains a design education: beauty with muscle, ornament with engineering, elegance with labor, darkness with luminosity. Its history warns us that buildings, neighborhoods, and institutions can be lost. Its restorations show that memory can survive when new use is introduced with imagination and care.

The Motor City Modern Renaissance is my name for that ongoing conversation. It is the belief that rebirth does not require amnesia. It is the decision to carry forward the strongest parts of what came before, then rearrange them for the lives we are building now.

Detroit's next chapter will not look exactly like its last one. It should not. But if we listen to the city - to its facades, materials, makers, ruins, restorations, and rooms - the future can still recognize itself in the past.

The Motor City Modern Renaissance is not about recreating old Detroit. It is about allowing Detroit's memory, craftsmanship, and cultural confidence to shape what rises next.

About the Author

Asia E. Adieh is the Founder and Creative Director of La Salle Collection, a Metro Detroit luxury furniture importer and design-visualization company serving residential and hospitality environments. Her perspective is informed by studies in history, philosophy, law and ethics, and art history; five years of student work in urban planning; and a lifelong relationship with Detroit's architecture and cultural life.

Sources and Further Reading

1. Detroit Historical Society - Great Fire of 1805 and the city motto

2. WDET - Why Detroit is called the Paris of the Midwest

3. UNESCO Creative Cities Network - Detroit

4. Historic Detroit - Guardian Building

5. Historic Detroit - Fisher Building

6. Book Tower Detroit - History and restoration

7. Quinn Evans - Michigan Central Station restoration

8. Design Core Detroit - Eight adaptive reuse projects

9. PAO Detroit - Former Michigan Oriental Theatre reopening

10. Architectural Digest - 2026 interior design forecast

11. ELLE Decor - Fall 2026 interior trends

Motor City Modern Renaissance  |