Author: Molly Willmott

Readers, it’s been a while since our last update on progress here at the offices of Contemporary Media. But we’ve been busy; we took our first large-scale installation in January and are finally getting settled in.

For this Rehab group, we focused on our editorial, design, and ad sales spaces. Carol Johnson and the staff at Spaces Group Memphis designed the space and chose the furniture, and our friends at Versatech once again handled the installation. Enjoy the slideshow!

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Our Office Rehab elves have been very busy the past few weeks at the Contemporary Media offices: we’ve repainted and recarpeted almost every space.

While we’ve recarpeted our offices within the past ten years, none of us can remember the last time the entire office was repainted. And in the intervening years, our staff has taken it upon themselves to paint their offices in many different shades, a few pictures of which we’ll share now:

• Our distribution manager’s office pre-rehab, a lovely robin’s egg blue

• The outer distribution office: desert theme!

• Tennessee Street in 1983, facing south. Contemporary Media offices are the gray building on left side of the picture.

Here at Contemporary Media, Inc., publishers of Memphis magazine, The Memphis Flyer, Memphis Parent, and MBQ: Inside Memphis Business, we’re quite proud of the creative writing and design we engage in every day as we create our print and digital products. Our office, however, has not necessarily matched our creative output, as our last full-scale interior update happened when we moved in, in 1984. So, on November 1st, 2012, Contemporary Media, Inc. embarked upon a renovation of our company offices.

Since 1984, we’ve been located in a three-story former coffee warehouse situated at the top of the South Bluffs of the Mississippi River, in downtown Memphis. Before downtown “came back,” we were right here on Tennessee Street, and we’ve seen enormous amounts of downtown growth in the intervening 25+ years.

When we moved in, instead of million-dollar homes across the street from our office as are there today, there were turn of the (last) century era unused warehouses. Instead of a trolley running every twenty minutes on the street in front of our offices, we had a gravel parking lot and gravel side roads all around us.

Things have changed downtown, and we’re glad they they have. And now we’ve decided to renovate and rehabilitate our office interiors to match the progress and modernity that we see all around us every day downtown.

We’re working with a commercial furniture dealership, Spaces Group, and we’re also utilizing the interior design services of Carol Johnson and Myra Deyhle, principals at Spaces Group. Carol and Myra have helped us envision our office space as it could be, and are working with us every day to develop, execute, and complete this rehabilitation project.

Follow us on this blog throughout the rest of 2012 and all of 2013 as we post before-and-afters and chronicle the rehab experience: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

And to kick off this project, here’s a short video of our CEO and Publisher, Kenneth Neill, telling us about downtown in the early 1980’s and the changes we’ve seen since.