A city often reveals itself through the stories embedded in its streets, buildings, neighborhoods, and public spaces. Before a visitor reads a guidebook or steps into a hotel, the architecture itself tends to exude many stories. Justin Colombik, co-founder and design director of RoseBernard Studio, agrees that such stories, while appearing like decorative layers, become the very infrastructure that shapes how people connect to a place.
"Story creates continuity. If you inherit a building, you're inheriting its history. You're a steward of that history," Colombik explains.
Preservation advocacy and years spent designing hospitality environments largely inform Colombik's perspective on the integrity of public spaces. With degrees in interior design, architecture, history, and art history, Colombik executes every project through a lens that weighs in the physical structure and the narrative it carries. Whether working on a hotel, restaurant, or preservation initiative, he believes design decisions should emerge from an understanding of what already exists rather than from an impulse to erase and replace.
Historic preservation is an integral aspect of Colombik's perspective. He views preservation as the protection of cultural memory. Buildings, according to him, serve as physical records of the people, industries, and communities that shaped them. Removing those structures without consideration, he argues, can weaken the narrative thread that gives a city its sense of identity.
Colombik explains, "Every building has a story of why it's there, what it looks like, and where it came from. If you take care of something and pass it along to the next generation, you're continuing that story."
He points to his own neighborhood in Chicago's North Side, The Edgewater Glen Historic District, as a testament to this commitment. Colombik highlights that he led an effort to place more than 350 homes on the National Register of Historic Places. The project, he recalls, required documenting 422 structures, compiling architectural surveys, coordinating with preservation consultants, and presenting the district significance to the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) and The Chicago Landmarks Commission, before final approval from The U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington DC, designating them as an open-air museum, turning the community of homes into a living archive.
The district, he notes, was earned due to Edgewater Glen's suburban-style island of distinct American Foursquare, single-family houses on extra-wide lots surrounded by a sprawling, densely built community.
"They were particularly impressed by the high percentage of buildings classified as 'contributing resources'- one of the highest for any historic district in both Chicago and Illinois. This designation makes Edgewater Glen one of the most intact historic districts in the state," he adds.
Colombik recalls that the designation, while securing recognition, also strengthened local engagement with the neighborhood's architectural heritage. In his view, it helped open pathways for restoration incentives that encourage homeowners to invest in preservation. "We created a passion that was already there, but made it official," he says.
The experience reinforced a principle that now guides his professional work. From his perspective, preservation begins with understanding what makes a place meaningful before determining how it should evolve.
"The home's design has already solved many problems before we arrive," Colombik explains. "If something works, respect it. Then find ways to make it function for today's users."
He emphasizes adaptive reuse to reflect that thinking, where older buildings are seen as opportunities for reinvention, with stronger material quality, richer architectural detail, and more durable bones than new construction. This outlook stems from observing the design industry consistently misrepresenting the true financial realities of preservation.
"People think, 'oh, it's historic, so it's more expensive,' but that simply isn't true," he says. He points to the conversion of an old hospital into a hotel as a case study. A former civic institution, also on the National Register of Historic Places, reborn as a functional hotel with its physical memory intact and financial incentives leveraged.
That way, historic buildings can find new life with modern industries while retaining the architectural character that made them significant in the first place. "You can take an old fire station and turn it into a restaurant. You don't have to tear something down when you can reuse the building and keep the story alive," Colombik explains.
It's this phrase, keeping the story alive, that defines how he approaches every project, residential or commercial. At RoseBernard, it translates into a design philosophy that treats a building's original structure as creative direction. The tall ceilings, original moldings, ornamental staircases, and decorative millwork all become assets that can amplify the narrative of place.
"New isn't automatically better. Many older buildings were constructed with materials and craftsmanship that are difficult to replicate today," he says. "Let the story of the building inform the decisions made in the design. It makes for a stronger, more impactful design versus tearing it down and building a box with no personality or authenticity."
Colombik now carries this mindset into new commissions, including a historic preservation project for a landmark venue in Chicago that has endured decades of damaging renovations and is now being brought back to its original character.
He says, "We believe in the power of bringing buildings like that back to their original life, and in that process, build a sense of community and reconnection for the people who use it daily," he says.
Colombik argues that neighborhoods and cities depend on narrative continuity to maintain their character, and architecture provides a framework through which residents understand where they live and how their community has evolved. Remove that framework, and places can eventually feel disconnected from their own history.
He emphasizes that developers and hospitality brands unlock real value when they understand a core truth: guests are magnetically drawn to places rooted in authentic heritage and a strong sense of identity. Design rooted in local history, he adds, often creates richer experiences than concepts imported without context.
As RoseBernard Studio continues to pursue hospitality and commercial preservation projects, Colombik leads each of them with a belief that good design starts with listening to the story a place is already telling.
