Designing Grand Yet Inviting Spaces For Utah’s Multifamily Market

Belle Kurudzija and her team are meticulous in the details they bring to their interior designs for multifamily spaces in Salt Lake City and the Mountain West. Every piece of furniture, for instance, has been thought out to bring a distinct, welcoming look to lobbies and other shared spaces.

But beyond distinctive designs, there is one thing Kurudzija most likes to see in her finished work: people.

“I want the space to feel very homey and not like just any generic room, and I want people to really want to use it,” said Kurudzija, head of commercial design for OpenRange, the new name for rebranded Lisman Studio Interior Design. “I love it when I go back to visit and see the spaces being used.”

In addition to multifamily, OpenRange's design work includes high-end offices, hospitality, a movie theater and other commercial assets.

Kurudzija, who has been with the Midvale, Utah, firm for nearly 20 years, honed her craft designing high-end private residences for Lisman clients. Her focus today is on multifamily, but she said she still applies many of the techniques she learned when she was designing the interiors of luxury homes.

Her first multifamily assignment came shortly after the Great Recession. Residential work had fallen off, but a client asked Kurudzija to design a new commercial building he was developing. 

“I designed it with a strong residential sense and using commercial products that were very residential in feel, because that's all I knew,” she said. “From that project, I started getting phone calls from people saying, ‘Wow, we toured this property and we'd love to hire you.’ That's when my multifamily book of business came to life.”

Today, under the OpenRange banner, Kurudzija oversees a growing team of junior and senior designers who are NCIDQ-certified or working toward being certified. The team follows the approach Kurudzija applied to her first multifamily job and has been refining since: taking residential ideas, applying them to multifamily and creating a space that looks similar to hospitality.

Her inspirations include luxury hotels, which are known for creating a dramatic sense of place the moment a guest enters the lobby. Among her stratagies is furniture that she custom-designs to be slightly overscale. Not only is this comfortable for guests, but it ensures that chairs, sofas and other accessories are not dwarfed by the grand spaces in which they sit.

“A lot of club rooms we design for are massive with 20-foot ceilings, and generic furniture cannot fill them. It just doesn’t look good,” Kurudzija said. “I think paying attention to details like that is where our success comes from because I have clients who tell me, ‘I can walk into any of your projects and know you did it because it has such a distinct feel.’ I take that as a compliment because my projects look different from other designers’ work.”

Her work is distinct enough that Utah Construction & Design magazine named one of her projects its 2023 project of the year. The Charles is a luxury multifamily building near Salt Lake City’s Delta Center, home to the NBA’s Utah Jazz. The magazine praised the new building’s interior design, describing it as “lively and fun.”

Kurudzija and her team created interiors that evoke the jazz scene of the 1920s for client The Ritchie Group, developer of The Charles and The West Quarter, a new mixed-use development in the city’s Warehouse Quarter.

Kurudzija approached the job in her usual methodical and detail-oriented manner, beginning by researching jazz clubs of the era to learn how spaces were laid out and which textures and colors were popular when Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were rising stars.

“That is how the design was born,” she said. “Like each of my projects, it should all fit together perfectly, like a well-arranged set of dominoes.”

With Lisman transitioning to OpenRange this summer, Kurudzija said her design team’s work will continue to focus on meticulous attention to detail.

“For over 30 years, we have built a solid client base with a particular design style,” she said. “We have a talented team, and we believe the new name and identity will help us continue to stand out in the industry, particularly among new clients who are looking for new design styles.”

Kurudzija will have an opportunity to reach new clients and catch up with old contacts when she participates in Bisnow’s Salt Lake City Multifamily Summit on July 11.

“I want to demonstrate that my talented designers and I are the right team for the job in Salt Lake City and Utah, and there's no need to hire out-of-state design firms,” she said.

This article was produced in collaboration between OpenRange and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.