The tower had supplied a small industrial town's water for sixty years before it was decommissioned, and it sat empty for another decade before a couple bought it with no clear plan beyond not wanting to see it demolished. What they ended up with is a three-story house: two new levels built inside the tower's original riveted steel legs, topped by a bedroom and bathroom inside the cylindrical tank itself.

The tank's riveted steel shell, roughly a quarter-inch thick, was structurally sound but had never been insulated or designed to hold interior finishes, so the architects built an independent insulated stud wall just inside the steel, leaving a service cavity between the two skins for new plumbing and electrical runs.

The tank was designed to hold two hundred thousand gallons. We just had to convince it to hold a bedroom instead.

Getting daylight into a windowless steel cylinder meant cutting six new openings through the original plate steel, each reinforced with a welded steel collar sized by a structural engineer to redistribute the load the cut had removed. The openings were placed to align with the tower's original rivet pattern, so the new windows read as part of the tower's original industrial logic rather than an afterthought.

Below the tank, the tower's four splayed steel legs — originally just structure, with no floor between them — were infilled with two new floor plates, each a slightly different shape to follow the legs' taper, which gives the two lower levels an unusual trapezoidal plan that the architects leaned into rather than squared off.

A new steel stair spirals up through the center of the legs to a hatch in the tank's original access floor, reusing the tower's original maintenance ladder route rather than cutting a new path through the structure.