Historic Preservation, Renovation & Adaptive Re-use

Court Square Center

A mixed-use rehabilitation of the 1924, twenty-one-story Columbian Mutual Tower and the 1886, five-story Lowenstein Brothers Department Store, programmed as a downtown living community of apartments, offices, and retail. Historic character in shell and structure was retained while contemporary finishes carried the new construction. On the Tower, the terracotta facade and original clay tile roofs were restored. On the Lowenstein Building, ornate cast iron, stone, and terracotta detailing destroyed in the 1960s was recreated to return the facade to its original configuration.

Hotel Napoleon

Built in 1902 by Napoleon Hill, the "Merchant Prince of Memphis," the Scimitar Building was converted into a fifty-eight room boutique hotel. Contemporary details and amenities were set against preserved historic fabric — the limestone facade, the original curved-glass wood windows, plaster capitals, and terrazzo floors.

Hotel Indigo

Built in 1963 as the Sterick North Garage and Hotel, the building sat blighted for decades — widely written off as one of the ugliest downtown. Listing it on the National Register opened the historic tax credits that made a 122-room boutique hotel possible. The work held onto its 1960s features while adding the contemporary flair the client needed, and coordinated local art throughout.

Oden

A 1940 Art Moderne building, originally a Loew’s Inc. and Columbia Pictures film-distribution building and one of the few Memphis Film Row structures still standing, rebuilt as the workplace for a Memphis marketing agency. Seven buildings across six additions, minimal windows, deep bays — conditions that pushed the team toward an open plan lit by skylights, with exposed masonry, steel, and wood structure left to read.

McEwen’s on Monroe / 124 Newsroom

The Rambler

A mixed-use rehabilitation at the south end of Main Street: eighteen short-term-rental units over three ground-floor retail bays and a bank, ranging from studios to three-bedroom units, with accessible units on both residential floors.

Hotline Lofts

Adaptive re-use of a historic South Main warehouse into fifteen downtown lofts — an early residential conversion on a street that had very little of it at the time. Completed while working as a project manager at JMGR.

109 North Main

Adaptive re-use of upper-floor space on Main Street as the firm’s own studio — a working demonstration of the loft-office conversion the practice recommends to its clients.

Friends For All Headquarters

Adaptive re-use of an iconic Mid-Century Modern building as headquarters for a non-profit serving vulnerable populations. The building had been the Tennessee Children’s Home Society site; the re-use gives a difficult history a public-serving future, with clinical, outreach and administrative space behind a restored front.

My City Rides Headquarters

Adaptive re-use for a non-profit that finances and services scooters so Memphians without a car can get to work — showroom, service bays and offices in one building.

The Louis Hotel

Led the team that completed a stalled renovation of a historic Tudor-style building into a sixteen-room boutique hotel, correcting outstanding code, fire and structural issues to reach opening.

Sterick Building Stabilization

Facade stabilization, interior fire-hazard abatement and mothballing of the vacant 1930 Gothic Revival Sterick Building tower — for decades the tallest building in the city, and empty since the 1980s. The work was holding action: make the envelope safe, remove what would carry a fire, and leave the building in a condition that a future rehabilitation could still start from.

Downtown Memphis Commission Tower

Renovation study for the vacant upper floors of the historic Crump Building, returning them to Downtown office space above the Downtown Memphis Commission’s own ground-floor tenancy.

The Heights Shopping Center

Facade renovation of a historic row of Summer Avenue storefronts, re-embracing the pedestrian streetscape the row was built for and stripping away later alterations that had turned it away from the sidewalk.