08/21/2026
🏙️ CITY MUSEUM LOFTS — OWN & LIVE INSIDE A WORK OF ART
In downtown St. Louis stands a massive former International Shoe Company factory that became the home of one of America's most extraordinary artistic environments: City Museum.
Created by sculptors Bob and Gail Cassilly and a team of artists and craftspeople, City Museum defies easy description. It is part sculpture, part architecture, part playground and part evolving installation—built from tunnels, bridges, slides, architectural remnants, reclaimed industrial objects and seemingly limitless imagination.
You can see the Museum here:
But there is another, much less widely known body of work inside the same building.
🏠 THE CITY MUSEUM LOFTS
Bob Cassilly brought that same artistic philosophy upstairs into a collection of privately owned residential lofts.
These were not simply apartments inserted into an old factory.
They became individual inhabitable works.
Sculpted walls. Hand-built architectural elements. Ornamental metalwork. Unconventional materials. Custom cabinetry and built-ins. Found objects. Artwork incorporated directly into the architecture. Industrial remnants deliberately preserved rather than concealed.
Each residence is different.
And several of them can actually be purchased.
For an art collector, I think there is an interesting way to look at these properties: What if the artwork wasn't something you placed inside the room? What if the room itself was the artwork?
The medium happens to be architecture.
The scale happens to be thousands of square feet.
And instead of simply owning it, you become its next steward.
Several 1-bedroom and 2-bedroom City Museum Lofts are currently available from USD $275,340 to $605,000, including residences that have never been privately occupied and are still waiting for their first owners.
These are extraordinarily difficult spaces to reproduce. The building, the history, the materials, the artists involved and the creative environment from which they emerged all form part of their story.
✨ FEATURED: UNIT 507E — 2 BEDROOM / 2 BATHROOM
One of the most distinctive available residences is Unit 507E.
Its current owners are looking for the next stewards of a space filled with sculptural architectural details, unusual finishes, custom cabinetry and built-ins, and artistic elements incorporated directly into the structure of the home.
This is not simply a residence in which someone has displayed art.
The residence itself is the art.
🔗 View Unit 507E:
https://www.stlouismissourihomes.com/listing/26049861-701-n-15th-street-507e-st-louis-real-estate/
🎥 TAKE A TOUR WITH
Still photographs don't entirely explain these spaces, so I created , a YouTube channel devoted to giving St. Louis' remarkable historic lofts a voice and allowing these unusual buildings and residences to tell their own stories.
▶️ Tour City Museum Loft Unit 507E:
https://youtu.be/hLxgkkJxLKM
