Over a career that spans a half-century, Memphis architect Jack Schaffer has designed thousands of buildings. Many are like the old slogan of Schaffer’s first client, Holiday Inn of America — “The best surprise is no surprise at all” — they are attractive, functional and resemble scores of sister designs.

The Hilton Garden Inn at Seventh Street and Wabash Avenue is another story entirely.

To be built on the contested site of the former Terre Haute House in the heart of downtown, the six-story hotel presented design demands that were anything but boilerplate for Schaffer.

For one, the footprint of the site is small and oddly shaped. The surrounding area is urban, not near an interstate highway or airport. In addition, “there were certain requirements from the owners,” among them “that the building be compatible with adjacent areas of the neighborhood,” said Schaffer.

All of which created the sort of challenge Schaffer says he has come to enjoy.

“I love these kind of projects,” he said during a lengthy telephone interview from his office at Bounds & Gillespie Architects, PLLC in Tennessee.

City officials and Tim Dora of Dora Bros. Hospitality Corp., which will own and operate the hotel, broke ground Monday on the Schaffer-designed Hilton Garden Inn Terre Haute House. The 109-room lodging is scheduled for completion and occupancy sometime next summer.

His end of the creative process finished, Schaffer did not attend the shovel ceremony in Terre Haute. Now 70, he has embarked on “a three-year plan in which I want to wind down and retire,” he said. He is choosing his projects judiciously and refers to himself already as “semi-retired.”

Schaffer (pronounced “SHAY-fer”) has known Tim and Robert Dora Jr. since the early 1990s when he designed a hotel for the brothers in Fishers. They are among a handful of clients for whom he’s chosen to stay available for consultation and advice.

“They’re just wonderful people to have as clients and friends, and I treasure the relationship,” the architect said.

Memphis born and raised, Schaffer’s interest in design began in early adolescence when he realized he was curious about “how things got built.” New homes were being constructed in his neighborhood and he liked watching general contractors at work.

His parents subscribed to home magazines, which young Jack pored over, studying floor plans of houses and architects’ renderings.

“I thought, I’d love to be able to paint like that and draw buildings. So I went out and got a little watercolor set. It kind of grew from there,” he said.

Through high school, taking every course even remotely related to construction and design, Schaffer found he was drawn more and more to the latter. He studied architecture textbooks and, like many in his and future generations, admired the innovative and organic work of Frank Lloyd Wright.

He learned “the business of design” during the same period, hanging out among artists and draftsmen in his father’s ornamental iron works operation. A few years down the line, a family would hire the firm to create white wrought-iron gates with a musical note motif for the entrance to its new home on Audubon Drive in Memphis.

The family’s name was Presley.

“I’d actually gotten to know Elvis a little when I was in high school,” Schaffer recalled. “A group of us were in charge of getting entertainment for the Veterans Hospital once a month on Friday night. There was this guitar player in town. Nobody really knew him outside the area, but we had him come in every two or three months to perform.

“Elvis was still in high school himself. Then he started doing local recordings and making a name for himself. One night, we had him booked at the VA and he was about 45 minutes late. He comes driving up in a black pickup with his girlfriend. He says, ‘Sorry, I’m late, boys. I just signed a contract to go to Shreveport and do “Louisiana Hayride.” I probably won’t be able to come over here again.’ He was right. He never performed for us again.”

Schaffer said he and Presley would run into each other in Memphis once in awhile — “before fame and fortune separated us” — and talk over old times. Schaffer’s father would reprise his musical note motif in the wrought iron gates of Graceland.

To this day, Schaffer remembers his legendary contemporary as “a nice young man.”

Another legend of sorts came into Schaffer’s life as the 1950s drew to a close.

Married, with only a couple of years of junior college under his belt, Schaffer was eager to earn a living at design. But with no formal training in architecture, “I couldn’t get a job anywhere.”

He wangled an interview at the firm of William Bond Jr. and Associates, and his timing could not have been better. A Memphis developer named Kemmons Wilson had asked the company to “draw up a little concept for a chain of hotels he had.” He called the hotels “Holiday Inns.”

Wilson liked what Bond’s architects envisioned. Suddenly the firm needed lots of people at the drafting boards to get the Holiday Inn work out. Schaffer was hired. He spent 18 years at Bond, eventually becoming its president.

After Bond closed in 1975, Schaffer co-created another firm, Archeon Inc., and piloted it until 2000, when he and his partner decided to “phase out” of owning and running a business. By then, he estimates, he had been in on the design of some 3,000 hotels. Many of them were Holiday Inns, which had become part of the Intercontinental Hotels empire.

His partner retired and Schaffer joined another lodging and hospitality specialist, Bounds & Gillespie. Paul Gillespie had interned for Schaffer at Bonds when Gillespie was in college.

The Terre Haute Hilton project is one of the last Schaffer will do with Bounds & Gillespie and probably the last for the Dora brothers. He liked the creative stretch this hotel presented, the process of “breaking away from the typical Hilton Garden Inn” design while maintaining the chain’s identity and brand.

The site’s “tight” size, L-shape and parking needs dictated a taller, more compact structure, Schaffer said, with frontage confined mainly to the Wabash Avenue side of the hotel. All meeting rooms, totaling 3,000 square feet, are on the second floor.

Originally, the Doras and Greg Gibson, who acquired the property from the Hulman Family, hoped some large limestone pieces from the demolished Terre Haute House could be used in the new building.

That turned out to be unworkable: The stone was “not in great shape,” Schaffer said. However, his subtly retro design is more than a respectful nod to the 77-year-old building that long stood at Seventh and Wabash — and to the era in which it was born.

“It was designed at a time when that building was groundbreaking for that particular tradition,” he said. “It included some new things that were eye-catching, like the combination of brick and limestone. It was very handsome.”

From the beginning, Schaffer said, the architects were aware, not only of the protracted controversy over the fate of the old hotel, but of “all the emotional attachments people had for it,” and its important role for generations in Terre Haute’s civic life.

They were determined to retain some of the past without compromising the elements necessary for an efficient, 21st-century hotel.

“We knew the existing hotel had a lot of character and tradition,” he said. “We didn’t want to replicate it, but we wanted to integrate some of that character and feel. We wanted something other than a sleek, contemporary hotel.”

Despite the volume of commercial structures Schaffer has designed over 50 years, he never has lost his sense that a building is alive — with the energy of its creators and of the people who live, work, play or stay in it.

Of the old and new Terre Haute Houses, he said:

“There is so much heart in something like this. We wanted to make it stay in the heart, not in the head.”

Tags: America Archeon Inc. Bed Bounds & Gillespie Architects PLLC construction Demand Design Dora Bros energy Frank Lloyd Recent Searches: Animal Services Advisory Board Animal Services Advisory Board Animal Services Advisory Board Animal Services Advisory Board Wiki