SCHULTZ SENIOR APARTMENTS
Project:
Taking the Louis J Schultz High School, located in Cape Girardeau’s Central Business District, and renovating it with tax credits into forty-five high efficiency apartments for affordable senior housing.
Inspiration:
Having to follow the guidelines of the Interior Design Standards, all of the original trim profiles, windows, flooring and doors had to remain in tact.
The Client:
Chad Hartle, Midwest real estate developer.
What We Love:
• The vast, original-sized windows that provide each apartment with more than enough natural light and custom window treatments.
• After removing the lockers, the cavities were left hollow but filled with strategically placed inscriptions explaining what club it represented.
• The original classroom doors were kept. Some doors were left to enter apartment units, but few were no longer being used as an entrance. For those few doors, I installed cork within them and used them as a bulletin board to display more memorabilia that I found.
• The custom designed timeline wall paper that wraps several walls gave us the opportunity to research old yearbooks and newspapers to tell the story of the building and the people that walked the halls.
What We Did:
Four different styles were developed to label the different types of apartments: “Tuscan, Neoclassical, Loft and Traditional”. Each style had a packaged set of coordinating finishes which included paint colors, cabinetry, countertops and flooring (carpet and vinyl plank). Unlike other jobs this one included working along side historic preservationists and graphic artists to follow the HP guidelines and to develop the timeline. Furniture was selected, decisions were made at the drop of a hat and random tasks were taken care of. In order to showcase all of the fifty plus clubs (aka classes), where the lockers once were, hours were spent “picking” antique malls, estate sales and random personal collections for the perfect pieces that were paired with strategically sized and placed inscriptions explaining each club.
