Rehabber’s Club Class Tonight: Patterson & Wilke-Shapiro on Design

Architect and blogger Steve Wilke-Shapiro and I will be co-presenting a class tonight as part of the St. Louis Rehabber’s Club Fall educational series:

How to decide what you will and won’t do? Where do you start? How should it look? Creating your design and solving design issues. What is worth doing and what is not? Where to spend your money? How much will it all cost? How to plan out a timeline and stick to it! Steve Wilke-Shapiro and Steve Patterson will speak on these subjects and more!

The Rehabber’s Club Classes are $15 which goes to help the programs of the Rehabber’s Club and its sponsoring organization ReVitalize St. Louis. None of the fee goes to speakers, all are volunteers.

Now some of you might be wondering what I know about residential rehab. Well, my bachelor’s degree from the University of Oklahoma College of Architecture is in “Environmental Design” which is a sorta fancy catch all for a combination of education in architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, construction science, historic preservation and city planning. I’ve spent most of my adult life doing design work for residential projects here in the St. Louis area. These included projects as simple as a small bathroom to a couple of homes where we tore off the roof and turned one story houses into two story houses.

The kitchen at right is part of a project I designed during my five years at Mosby Building Arts (some of you may know Scott Mosby from his Saturday morning home improvement show on KMOX). This suburban house was a dog and sat on the market until our clients purchased the home. My design called for a new garage to be added on one side and use the old 3-car garage for the new master suite. The central part of the house was opened up, giving it a more modern & spacious feeling.

Tonight I’ll talk about renovation of city houses touching on issues such as how to reconfigure the floor plan, material selection, lighting, appliances as well as a provide a detailed do’s and don’ts list. Achieving good design on a budget will also be addressed as most of us don’t have hundreds of thousands to spend on renovations. Steve Wilke-Shapiro will touch on some of this from his experience as well as talk about some of the timelines and such for a successful project.

The class starts tonight at 7pm at the Central Reform Congregation located at the corner of Waterman & Kingshighway (map). No need to pre-register, just come a bit before 7pm, pay your $15 and enjoy the class. See you tonight!