One of two stainless steel spiral staircases, this one ascends directly into the Tower. It’s surrounded by custom woodwork made by a Ukrainian master carpenter. He used locally salvaged and recycled lumber throughout the project.
Repairing the Tower had to stay with strict historic standards. The previous owner of the building (the condo building owner) signed off on the Tower’s historic facade in exchange for big tax credits.
But repairing the exterior probably was just a taste of what the interior makeover would entail.
“At times, I wanted to lean more toward the contemporary side,” Batherson says. “But I feel now that we struck the right balance. It’s not too contemporary. Instead, we managed to marry the old and the new.”
THE DRAWING BOARD
Early in the renovation, the project stalled. The design didn’t seem to be working. At that point, Ron Jones, our own Green Builder Media president, happened to be in New Orleans. He learned about the project from the remodeling contractor, Tony Wendell, and met with Batherson and his wife to look over their plans.
“They had a good engineer, but the architectural drawings were lousy,” recalls Jones. “The sequence was all out of order. “For example, they carved out a big area for plumbing on one level, and had done some ridiculous preliminary work, strung some band joists around, and put in some I-joists for the floor so that the ceiling above was too low. It felt like a teepee.”
Jones, an experienced designer and custom home builder, drew them some new sketches. He also suggested that they try to acquire the adjacent condo, if possible. To everyone’s good fortune, that opportunity arrived. The adjacent space became available, including the hallway.
“He was able to buy the other unit,” Jones recalls, “and even though that meant starting over with the design, it added 600 square feet for us to work with, so I encouraged Bill to grab it.”
“Once we acquired that other condo,” Batherson adds, “we were able to lay out a catwalk that tied the loft of that new unit to the second floor of the Clock Tower. So everything now integrated much better.”
Together, Jones and Batherson came up with innovative solutions to the restrictive dimensions of the Clock Tower space— sometimes by necessity, often by design. “We originally tried to have one spiral go all the way to the top of the Tower,” Batherson recalls, “but because of the pitch of roof we had to reconfigure so it goes only from the third to the fourth floor.”
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