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Take a look around your office. How is it designed? Has someone chosen the colors and furniture with a eye for style, or did they just default to Modern Cubicle?
Sherri Smith understands that we are all influenced by our interiors. As director of design for Real Development, it’s her job to update the office space for new tenants in the company’s 11 downtown properties, including Sutton Place and the Orpheum Office Building. Her role runs the gamut; from researching the design, to projecting costs, selecting finishes and even managing the project.
Smith’s projects can be as small as a two-person counseling office that needs soothing tones and textures, or as large as a corporate client in search of a polished, conservative look for its 20,000 square feet.
“More people are wanting to step out of the box and modernize their space,” Smith says. “People are realizing that modernizing their space attracts a different type of employee. There are sometimes four generations working together now — and that’s hard for some people.”
So Smith often finds herself playing mediator for clients who design by committee. When conflicts spring up, she finds compromises that do the best job of satisfying gaps in generations — and in tastes.
Smith herself was just a kid when she got her first lesson in design, at her parents’ paint and decorating store in Meade, Kansas. Dad was a painter who could also hang wallpaper and install tile. Mom was a seamstress who created custom window treatments. Smith and her three brothers grew up as apprentices.
“As a teenager, I had two options: either find a job, or work with Dad,” Smith says. “I found lots of little part-time jobs, but none ever paid what I could get working 40 hours painting and wallpapering. Consequently, I probably have a slightly different view of each design project ahead of me, than do most designers, because I’m able to actually visualize what the space could be, while keeping in mind the cost of labor and materials.”
But Smith didn’t go straight from her parents’ shop to design school. She was in her mid-20s and the single parent of a 3-year-old daughter when she went back to school. Drawing on her past experience and current hobbies, she says, “it took me about two weeks to figure out what I wanted to do.”
Smith went on to work in a handful of office furniture and design companies in Kansas and Missouri. Now, with budget on every client’s mind, Smith says her goal is to create a dream space for every client that gets the biggest bang for the buck. Just as any home DIY’er knows, the right wall color and flooring go a long way toward making that happen.
Real Development is working on making its own statement with Wichita’s streetscapes and skyline. The company is in the midst of updating the facades of six downtown properties and should be finished by the end of the year. Smith’s involvement in the project is limited, but as a designer she believes the aesthetics of commercial spaces — inside and out — have a strong influence on our collective mood and senses, just as they do in our own homes.
“We all want to be in a space that not only feels good, but looks good,” Smith says. “I find the downtown revitalization efforts to be very exciting. Wichita’s downtown is somewhat unique in that we have the Arkansas River as a core downtown element that we have begun to build around and celebrate.
“Ten years from now, I would hope that we will have reached a point where the core is saturated with people who live, eat and breathe downtown Wichita.”
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