HISTORIC PRESERVATION, RESTORATION & RENOVATION

The historic home of Grace Julian Clarke – suffragist and political activist (1865-1938) – is an important Indiana Landmark. The Sapphire was called when this exquisite home suffered severe damage from a storm that sent a huge tree through the house. Our team was able to rebuild the space, restore the woodwork and replace the carved plaster ceilings by creating custom-made tools and using historically accurate techniques to re-create the original decorative elements.

Visible from the split of I-65 and I-70 at the east edge of downtown Indianapolis, School #9 is named for Clemens Vonnegut Sr., father of author Kurt Vonnegut. The school first opened in 1899 as the grade school for the city’s Ninth Ward. The building was transformed in 1997 with a roughly $3 million renovation, updating mechanicals while preserving the building’s historic character. The building was acquired by advertising firm Young & Laramore around 2005, which reconfigured the interior with renovations blending old and new.

Young & Laramore reached out to The Sapphire in 2020 needing our expertise to preserve the windows, distressed by over a century of weather and ware. Between 2021 and 2024, we undertook one of the most significant preservation efforts in the building’s recent history: the meticulous, one-by-one restoration of more than 100 original windows and sills. This painstaking work preserved the building’s historic fenestration — the large banks of windows that give School #9 its distinctive character and flood its interior spaces with natural light — rather than replacing them with modern substitutes. It stands as a meaningful contribution to the long-term integrity of the structure.

Storefront Theatre originally occupied the lower level of a building near the corner of Broad Ripple Avenue and College Avenue in Broad Ripple Village. The space above was previously home to Crackers Comedy Club before closing in 2017 and leaving the basement level as a raw, empty, unfinished shell.

Ronan Marra, a fourteen-year veteran of Chicago’s Signal Ensemble Theatre, moved to Indianapolis in 2015 and founded Storefront Theatre in 2017 with a mission to produce professional, intimate theatre in the Chicago storefront tradition, focusing on new work by female, minority, and international playwrights. After staging its first two productions at IndyFringe’s Indy Eleven Theatre, Marra secured the vacant basement at 717 Broad Ripple Ave as a permanent home — and hired David Orr to design and build it out from scratch.

The Sapphire transformed the unfinished space into a complete, 7,500-square-foot performing arts facility: a 50-seat black-box theatre with flexible seating configurations, a full bar, dressing rooms, a director’s office, and a mutable gallery space that doubles as a classroom for local school programs. The build-out gave Broad Ripple its first professional theatre presence since the 1980s. Storefront opened in June 2019.

The Offices of the Attorney General in Indiana’s historical Statehouse was renovated by The Sapphire. We provided interior design, decorative painting and plaster restoration to all of the offices. The new look was a creative collaboration that compliments the building’s atrium, the supreme court and offices and the governor’s offices.

“What happened was a true transformation of a place that was neglected that has now been carefully, meticulously restored…. When you walk in there now, you feel a certain sense of grandeur, and also I feel a personal sense of pride that this is a piece of Indiana history.” Jeremy Brilliant, Director of Communications.

Check out this VIDEO about the project!