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 (TOP
CENTER: LEFT TO RIGHT) JIM KEHOE, Design Director;
PATRICIA WHITAKER, President and CEO; MARGARET
MCDONALD, Design Director
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distinguished
DESIGN
Drive and adaptability leads architectural and design firm Arcturis
to new heights.
By Kevin Kipp
Yes, the circle WILL be unbroken at Arcturis.
Not because president and CEO Patricia Whitaker is returning to
retail purchasing—her first job after her liberal arts studies at
Ohio State University. No, she is not.
And not because she’s leading her full-service design firm back
into single-family residential interiors—where her current career
began. No, she and her colleagues continue to refer that kind of
business to someone else.
But recently Arcturis did add retailers to its client list: the
Byrd Store and Sammy’s Shoes. These join a roster of names more
likely to appear in the Wall Street Journal than the Suburban
Journals: Edward Jones, Commerce Bank, Energizer, Enterprise
Rent-A-Car, Nestlé Purina PetCare, The Private Bank, Pharmacia,
and Solutia Inc.
Throughout its 25-plus-year history, Arcturis has responded adroitly
to market conditions, challenges and opportunities. A workload comprising
1,000-square-foot storescapes as well as 300,000-square-foot headquarters
and 100-acre master plans is simply the latest incarnation of the
firm’s alert adaptability under Whitaker’s leadership.
The firm characterizes its planning, architecture, interior design,
and workplace strategies as a “circle of services.” At peak, Arcturis
employed 80 and grossed $10 million.
Even with last year’s sluggish economy (which Whitaker sees recovering),
Arcturis established starter offices in Phoenix and Dallas, and
Whitaker has a vision to double her firm’s size within five years.
Wager that she will.
“My first job was as a retail buyer for The Metropolitan in Dayton
during the 1970s,” Whitaker says. “I chose to move into the field
of interior design because it was more challenging and creative.”
“In the middle ’70s,” she continues, “I relocated to St. Louis,
got married, took a job with Stix Baer & Fuller in the interior
design department, and worked there for two years.”
She had two kids. Whitaker says she needed a more flexible schedule
“to spend more time with them, so I started my own company.”
Her own company. Her own clients. Her fate in her own hands. Fortune
smiled.
“I was doing a residential job for Ruby and John Critzas,” Whitaker
says. “He asked me to do his office in the factory where his company
was making the product Goop.”
An epiphany in the goop factory...”The office work was great!” Whitaker
says. “John wanted it completed so he could get back to work. It
had to be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. But it was
so much more efficient that it got me to start thinking about commercial
work.”
That’s as opposed to “home design,” she says, “which is more personal.
Clients are more involved. Family members can disagree on how they
want [their home] to look. Sometimes it seems like a project just
won’t end. With commercial work, the project turnaround is quick.”
In the ’70s, she began concentrating on offices for doctors and
dentists—ranging from 500 to 2,500 square feet, many of them out
on Ballas Road.
In 1979 Whitaker got involved in the Wainwright State Office Building
as a sub-contractor to Team Four architects. “It was 200,000 square
feet for the state of Missouri, a very big project. I worked with
the architects at Team Four, and [another epiphany] I discovered
how much more profitable and efficient larger jobs were than smaller
ones. At about the same time, I was adding people...first a bookkeeper,
then other interiors staff.”
After Wainwright—in the early ’80s, a “sort of a boom time in corporate
design,” she called it — Whitaker began calling on corporations.
She landed work with Monsanto, Continental Telephone, and Southwestern
Bell…just in time for the ATT divestiture.
“They needed to be physically divested, too,” Whitaker says. “It
created huge deadlines.”
And huge opportunity. Her firm enjoyed three years of 100 percent
growth. “It was a huge portion of our work. We couldn’t afford to
be fired. The fear of going out of business is very motivating.”
In the early ’80s, the growing commercial work also called for having
a registered architect on board. Enter Vernon Remiger, AIA, now
COO and principal (one of eight, including Whitaker) at Arcturis.
“Vern joined us as we began doing more interior architecture...walls,
lights, ceilings. Vern brought us his architectural prowess, plus
now we had our own guy with a seal. It was trouble to go out-of-house
every time we needed our architectural drawings sealed.”
(LEFT) COMMERCE BANK
CONTACT CENTER, Creve Coeur, MO. For this
54,000-square-foot space, Arcturis provided site selection
and architecture interiors services for adaptive re-use.
(CENTER) ENTERPRISE
RENT-A-CAR/E-COMMERCE GROUP, St. Louis,
MO. Designed to create an inviting environment for
guests and staff.
(RIGHT) EDWARD JONES
DATA CENTER, St. Louis, MO. Arcturis provided
architecture and interiors services addressing both
form and function for this 81,000-square-foot new
information technology building. |
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Later in 1999, Whitaker and associates also determined to remove
a self-inflicted impediment. “Our original name, Interior Space
Inc., held us back a little bit. We wanted to emphasize architecture.”
Arcturis, she explains, is the product of informal deliberation.
The a-r-c recalls architecture. The i-s recalls Interior Space,
“and the u-r sort of holds it together.”
Remiger says that after earning his bachelor’s with a major in architecture
and his master’s of architecture at Washington University, he did
what many young architects do. “For the first six or seven years,
younger architects might float around a little bit looking for exactly
what they want to do. But after 17 years now, I’ve found a home
here.”
It also “intrigued” him, Remiger says, to join a firm “transitioning
from an organization doing mostly interiors to a full-service design
firm.”
Well, with an AIA member on board, what do you do? Go after architectural
work, of course. So beginning with architectural renovations—25,000
square feet and up—they did.
As they did, they added more architects, architects who Whitaker
says wanted to go after “ground-up work.”
(Left
to Right) VERNON REMIGER,
AIA, COO; PATRICIA WHITAKER,
President and CEO; RON JOHNSON,
Principal of Design of Arcturis; FLOYD
ZIMMERMAN, FASLA |
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Since the early ’80s, they have been getting their wish. They landed
a 200,000-square-foot facility for Southwestern Bell Publications
(i.e., Yellow Pages). The work, Whitaker says, entailed “putting
in walls, using engineers to design the HVAC, and using electrical
engineers to make our fixture placements work. There’s a lot more
technical work involved than just making the space pretty.”
Arcturis also undertook architectural and design work in the mid
’90s for the Missouri Department of Transportation’s Intelligent
Transportation Systems building at Woodsmill and Highway 40.
In 1999 Solutia retained Arcturis to work with them on the development
of their new 280,000-square-foot headquarters. After an extensive
programming process and site evaluations, Solutia settled on a building
in Maryville Center. The developer used their architect to design
the building shell. Whitaker says it was attractive, but “with many
stepped down angles and column spacing laid out, Solutia’s usable
space was significantly reduced.
“When we sat down with Solutia and explained what they were paying
for and what they would actually have as final usable square footage,
they had us make recommendations,” she says. “Our redesign resulted
in an additional 17,000 square feet of usable square feet for Solutia.
Over the course of a 10-year lease, that represents a significant
savings.”
It is consistent with how Arcturis distinguishes itself, Remiger
says. “The standard AIA client agreement calls for clients to give
the architects their program. We try to develop that program with
the owner. What they’re doing on a daily basis determines the inside,
and the image they want to portray is expressed in the shell that
we design around the interior space.
“Once we determine the client’s program, we design from the inside
out,” he says.
“It requires understanding support space, including how things are
printed, copied and stored,” Remiger says. “Organizations are built
around technology, and those can be the hub of a space. We also
see CEOs abandoning the ivory tower [a.k.a. corner office] to locate
in the center of the building to be among their people...to be accessible.”
EDWARD
JONES DATA CENTER, Lobby Entrance, St.
Louis, MO. |
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Edward Jones has developed a relationship with Arcturis that embodies
the full circle of services. Wendy Monso, the Edward Jones principal
handling their 2 million square feet of headquarters and corporate
facilities, describes her responsibilities in two categories. One
is property management: making sure lights are on, grass is cut,
doors are locked at night.
The other is workplace strategies, “planning all the space and how
it will be used,” Monso describes it. “We have about 4,000 people
working in our facilities, and that number is growing 10 to 15 percent
a year. Based on their functions and how their departments interact,
where are we going to put them? Do they have the proper space and
furniture? Are there enough computers, printers and fax machines?”
More Monso: “That has an impact on all types of space...where they
work, eat and train. We have to take those needs into account in
our planning and forecasting. And we want to deliver it just in
time; there are impacts on capital expenditures.”
The people on whom Monso relies to help her juggle all this are
10 Arcturis employees. “They have the expertise and we didn’t have
to train them,” she says.
Arcturis connected the arcs in its circle of service with the addition
of planning in 2000. It is in the veteran hands of Floyd Zimmerman,
a fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Zimmerman retired from HOK almost seven years ago. “I discovered
my golf game wasn’t getting any better, so I began consulting HOK
overseas. I also started on a contract basis with Arcturis in connection
with an Edward Jones project. We hit it off really well.”
Whitaker persuaded Zimmerman to sign on as a part-timer. “Half-time
lasted about two weeks,” he says. “Now it’s more than full time.
Of course, if my golf game had improved, my retirement might have
been entirely different.”
Zimmerman explains, “Master planning is essentially taking 1,000
acres—or a couple of acres—and arranging a program for buildings,
parking, open space, circulation, drainage and grading...vertical
and horizontally.
“We collaborate with architects to make the design more complete,”
he says. “Working together is the most important part. It is more
thorough design to have the services come from one place.”
Zimmerman says his design work “carries through to contract documents,
detailing every piece of the site from how to plant the trees to
where to put the lights. Then when a contract goes out for bids,
everyone is working from the same documents. It helps us compare
apples to apples, and to make sure a client gets everything that
he’s paying for.”
Whitaker explains that her firm’s offerings are called a circle
of services because you can enter it at any point in the process
and still take advantage of everything Arcturis offers.
Client programs inform workplace strategies and interior design
which inform architectural design. Planning in turn molds the environment
in which the building functions.
Whitaker points out that planning, done right, leads naturally to
architectural contracts. “After all, the relationship with the client
is already established.”
She will expand her firm’s planning capacity as part of her growth
strategy. Nonetheless, Whitaker also expects the firm’s bread and
butter will remain corporate interiors and architecture.
Civic contributions are also integral to Whitaker’s leadership.
Among the boards on which she serves are the YMCA of Greater Saint
Louis, the RCGA, the Hawthorn Foundation, the Saint Louis Art Museum
and the St. Louis Science Center. She is president of the St. Louis
Forum, an exclusive women’s professional organization.
Larry Alvey, president and CEO at the YMCA, says Whitaker has been
active on the executive and other committees. But he singles out
her involvement on the proctor’s committee that oversees construction.
With a capital campaign that raised $52 million, St. Louis has seen
in the last three years five new YMCAs, nine additions and six renovations.
“Throughout that process,” Alvey says, “we had to qualify general
contractors, schedule activities, bid jobs, set priorities and allocate
funding. Pat and her experience have been a great asset.”
Meanwhile, the circle of services at Arcturis has been an asset
in easing the pain of a faltering economy. It facilitated the firm’s
diversification into new markets. Besides retailers, Arcturis projects
include public safety and community facilities, a retreat center,
higher education and more banks.
OSBORNE & BARR HEADQUARTERS,
Clayton, MO. Arcturis provided interior, architecture
and design services for this 26,000-square-foot space
in the Shaw Park Place Building.
THE PRIVATE BANK,
Richmond Heights, MO. Arcturis provided interior,
architecture and design services to attract the upscale
market. |
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Whitaker senses a turnaround. “And when we go looking for those
talented architects and interior design and facilities people, we’ll
have the advantage that we’ve been recognized as one of the best
places to work locally.” Whitaker says. “We’re very proud of that
distinction.”
Kevin Kipp runs Bubble Communications, a creative services and
community relations firm in St. Charles.
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