Tag Archives: office

shoptalk, WORK

nomad

room with a view

Well… It’s official… We’re moving our studio. The talks with our friends with the loft downtown were successful and they’re going to let us set up shop in the corner of their HUGE space in exchange for design services.

Technically, for a myriad of bureaucratic reasons, we’re not really there. We’ll simply be vendors working on-site for a client… Our “official” business will be nomadic… (yes – there’s a way you can actually do that – and it requires carrying your business license in your car… The city of St. Louis is tedious when it comes to working with small businesses.

view overlooking Washington Ave.

The building is mid-restoration. Still dirty and funky… A welcome change from the dry-walled, drop-ceiling cave we work out of now. The building is primarily inhabited by photographers, artists and other designers and sits at the corner of the newly revitalized “urban-hipster” part of town. (St. Louis’ latest, mega-expensive, effort to gentrify downtown.) The area is peppered with lofts, night clubs, boutique stores and restaurants.

While anything dictated by someone else as “cool and hip” generally makes me snarl – I think the change in environment will be stimulating.

We’ll be taking over my friend, Jeanette’s old space. She gave us permission to box up her stuff which still sits frozen in time from when her and her husband moved to LA. It’s a corner with a great view but I’m afraid of heights so I’ll probably sit back from the window a ways.

I’m really nervous.
I’m really excited.
I’m really not blogging.

LIVE

voluntary beauty

wuz dat?

I’m not generally the type to stop and take notice of green things. I’d rather leave that up to the folks like bitterlawngnome who do so beautifully in his botanically biased blog.

Nonetheless – I ran out to my car for something, (read as pack of smokes), and noticed a voluntary little plant flower thing that cropped up in the decorative weed patch in front of my studio.

Times like this I wish I had a blog so I could document the little beauty and ask for someone to identify it.

LIVE

lofty thoughts

kickin back with darvocet

mojobear‘s day off – my Wednesday to solo in the office. “IN” the office indeed. I’ve been off-site all day, (and still working) – The PowerBook Rocks.

Jeanette, PR Spin-maven, long time colleague and adored friend has come back to St. Louis to have some surgery done. (She maintains two residences – a office / studio loft with her hubby’s company here and one in Los Angeles).

I ran some errands this morning and swung downtown to visit my convalescing comrade.

St. Louis’ downtown, though nothing like the wasteland it was back in the 70’s and early 80’s – is still somewhat spotty. Wealthy entrepreneurs have been buying up old buildings by the block and converting them into lofts. This is great and very chic in an early 90’s sort of way – but downtown’s gentrification is far from done. (For example – if you live downtown and want to buy a gallon of milk, you’ve got to drive 10 minutes to the outer city where there’s supermarkets).

J’s in the AD Brown Building, pet project and money pit for one of the city’s more eccentric, wealthy “men about town”. He sits on a lot of important museum boards, throws great parties – and can drink an Irishman under the table.)

The Brown Building, former home for the Brown Shoe Company, now shelters a dozen smaller companies – including a few photographers, a “bleeding edge” ad agency and a few creative boutiques.

I’ve gotten my share of peer pressure over the years to “come on down” and join the cosmo-cool-clan, but have resisted.

Deciding to go “laptop” was the beginning of a some serious changes in my attitude about work and life in general. It will be a while before all these changes gel and I can figure out where this is all going.

I hate our present office. Our first studio was a converted barbershop in the outer-city which we lovingly restored and decked out to our specs. (Corrugated metal walls, the whole nine yards). Two years later the landlady died and the family sold off the building and we were displaced. We found a new place to work right down the street in a rehabbed 4 family. White walls.. Drop Ceiling.. Fluorescent Lights. It’s terribly dull. Shortly thereafter airplanes crashed into buildings in New York and the rest of the bottom fell out of the economy and our business halved. We’ve been treading water ever since.

The idea of getting a tiny space in a big dirty building may be the change of pace we need. We carpool into the city anyway – and Chad’s work, (The Hard Rock Cafe), is right in the heart of downtown as well.

Lots to meditate about – but not blog about.