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Hastings & Chivetta Architects is a full service architectural and engineering company. We practice out of our headquarters in St. Louis, but we go across the nation. Our focus is on higher education, and particularly institutions or municipalities throughout the United States. As a design firm, we’ve looked for a number of years, actually over 20 years, in order to create our own home, our own identity, you might say, as a firm and as an organization.

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Our focus of this building was to create a new environment for our employees for design, creativity and collaboration. As we looked at contractors to consider for this project, we knew that G. S. & S Construction could meet our compressed schedule, and their familiarity working within a municipality that has high design standards.

They had a very collaborative approach, internal to our team, as we put the project together, and with our own interior designers, our architects, our construction people all working together. We had very early conceptual drawings that we sat down with each other and we talked the pros and cons of things about what could be done, what could be actually expended within our budgets in order to realize our vision and our dream, but also to be cost effective. Being architects, we’re very picky. They exceeded all of our high standards while maintaining a very strict control of our project budgets as well.

Chris Hyams at the helm of G.S. & S. Construction really established the leadership that we needed to sign, what I call, the correct team for our project. His experience and his staff was just paramount to our success on the overall project.

One of the things that distinguishes G. S. & S. Construction from other construction companies is our ability to self-perform work. We self-perform a lot of our own demo, a lot of concrete, metal studs, drywall, casework, doors, trim. Approaching it that way allows us to have a much better control over the schedule, and having control over the schedule really sets us apart from others, and really made a job like Hastings & Chivetta possible. We had a very compressed schedule here with a challenging municipality to work in. And we’re very proud of the work we did here. The finishes in here allowed us to showcase our abilities, and as proud as Hastings & Chivetta is in the design that they came up with, we are as proud as the execution that we put into it.

Chris Hastings has been a great project manager to lead our team. He oversaw the construction schedule, the coordination of the subcontractors and the trades, and really worked diligently to meet a very constricted, and when I say compacted construction schedule for us.

We got involved with the Hastings & Chivetta corporate office headquarters, I want to say, in November sometime. Chris Chivetta hadn’t quite closed on the building yet. We were actually looking at multiple properties throughout the process with different entities and Chris Chivetta. Ultimately, he decided on this building. We had budgeted it off of some schematics, one-line diagrams, a few pages. And from that point forward we were a part of the team. We went well with their project managers, their interior designers. And we started to just look at ways to save them money, so they could within their budget that they had allotted for their new office.

G.S. & S. Construction was a great partner for us, because this building was a transformation from a 1980s office building into what we consider a 21st century modern office. The personal relationships that we’ve had with the G. S. & S. Construction staff over the years were paramount in our selection of them. Their prices were very competitive, very adequate, and more importantly, their experience working in Maryland Heights was something that we thought was a real attribute to our overall construction process.

We had a very short time duration for the project. We literally closed on our building on December 28th and we moved into our space on May 17th. After renovating extensively 20,000 square feet, updating all the building mechanical systems, exterior skins and facades, and really converting this into what I consider a state-of-the-art corporate headquarters for us.