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Photographs by Kevin A. Roberts
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She’s lost everything—job, house, car—except for her children and two garbage bags full of their belongings. She walks into the Gateway 180 homeless shelter, where the people are helpful and the food is fresh—but is greeted by sterile white walls, a large institutional room, and a high intimidating desk.
This is not the introduction to Gateway Jenn Gauthier-Lyke, resource development director, wants for her clients.
“This area is where the reality of homelessness hits them,” Gauthier-Lyke says.
The staff works hard to be friendly, she adds, but the foyer and greeting room are anything but personable. That’s why a local interior design group, Cure Design, has taken on the renovation.
In a nearly 90-year-old building at Martin Luther King Drive and 19th street, the shelter provides transitional housing to women and children and is the largest 24-hour emergency shelter in Missouri.
Although the new space is designed to feel more like home, Gauthier-Lyke says the plan is to get their clients into a new home within 30 days. In 2010, the shelter put 279 people into new homes, and 84 percent of the people they help do not become homeless again.
“They walk in and enter into a very strict program designed to end homelessness,” she says, “and make that ‘180’, that’s in our name, for their family.”
Cure Design helped the shelter with a gala benefit last year, and the relationship has continued. The redesign of the foyer only took one weekend and a crew of volunteers each day.
On Friday, Cure design director Sara Turner and associate designer Bri Zobrist walked throughout the space, explaining their plan for the first day of work.
An unused fireplace will become storage space, and a cold corner will become a welcoming sitting place complete with chairs and pillows. Friday was “detail and demo day,” meaning the old bulky desk would come down, and painting prep would begin.
Gauthier-Lyke said she was excited but couldn’t visualize the finished room. The designers laughed and promised they could see it all in their heads. Before the work is finished, they said they will ask Gauthier-Lyke to leave. When she returns, she can open the front door and see the space just like a family would see it for the first time.
After Friday’s “demolition,” they began working on the trim. Saturday was a 12-hour day devoted to painting, and Sunday they assembled the desk, staged the sitting areas and added the finishing touches.
When Gauthier-Lyke entered the building for the first time she said it was one of the biggest transformations she had ever seen.
“I describe it as a ‘move the bus’ moment for Gateway,” she says, “because that’s how meaningful it is.
Now the area has a more welcoming feel. When the doors open, you enter the orange, egg white and dark chocolate brown lobby and see smiling faces working behind a three-tiered wooden desk, whose front doubles as an announcement chalkboard.
Above the desk are an abstract oil painting and two vases filled with delicate flowers. Sitting on the old fireplace mantle are wooden blocks that spell out “family.”
“Now, I think it feels much more like a home,” she says. “You still don’t want to have to be here, but it definitely lifts the burden of being here and makes it more comfortable and friendly.”
The lobby walls are adorned with black and white photographs of some of the children the shelter has served in the past. A little girl in braids, another holding a teddy bear and a baby boy snuggled in a fleece blanket all welcome you to your new beginning.
To the left of the doors is the new waiting room. A brown suede couch, an olive green chair and a painting of a girl sending a heart-shaped balloon into the sky make a cozy corner of relaxation.
Walk farther down the hall, and you can see children’s drawings lining the wall of their special new art gallery.
On the other side of the lobby is a small open office space, decorated with a photo of a mother cuddling with her giggling child and frames that say, “The road ahead lies within” and “Good things will happen today.”
Gauthier-Lyke says the shelter will continue to need the community to volunteer in the room makeovers because they are used all of the time. The groups that have adopted a room for the year come in and touch-up paint and replace bedding.
She says that their clients have shared with them their appreciation of the redesign and say that the building feels more alive and happy.
“There is definitely a lot of love in this space,” she says.
Gateway 180 Makeover - St. Louis AT HOME - March/April 2011 from St. Louis Magazine on Vimeo.
See what happened one weekend in January when the designers at CURE Design Group tackled the redesign of Gateway 180, a shelter for homeless women and their children.
By CJ Lotz and Caitlin Carter
