Sheet A · Historic renovation
Historic renovation in St. Louis: old brick, new systems, one honest schedule
We open up older St. Louis buildings, learn what they actually hold, and rebuild them into apartments, offices and commercial space that will serve the next owner.
Chapter 01
What an old St. Louis building is hiding behind the plaster
Every old brick building in St. Louis keeps a few secrets. The walls may be three wythes of soft red brick or a thin face over rubble. A floor may sag half an inch across one bay, and the stair you planned to keep may sit exactly where the new corridor has to run. We start with an existing-conditions survey, opening ceilings and walls before a price is locked.
Masonry gets the first hard look. Failing mortar, spalled faces, rusted lintels and open joints tell us how much of the envelope can stay and how much must be rebuilt by hand. Structure comes next. Old timber, cast iron columns and uneven floor-to-floor heights decide where new mechanical runs can go, and how a code-driven upgrade to egress, fire separation or accessibility fits inside walls never built for it.
None of this is guesswork when the survey comes first. Our pre-construction team walks the building with the owner, writes down what is known and what is not, and carries the open questions as named allowances instead of burying them. Surprises still happen in a hundred-year-old building. The difference is whether the budget and schedule were built to absorb them.
Restored four-storey red brick Georgian Apartments building with an ornate cornice under a blue sky
Transformations we have delivered
The Georgian Apartments is the job people point to: a four-storey red brick building with an ornate cornice, restored and put back to work. Gateway Lofts at 4400 Manchester and the Hibernia Apartments belong to the same family of older buildings carried forward into multi-family use. The Hadley-Dean Building and the Nash Building show the office and commercial side of the same skill.
Public buildings ask different things of a contractor. At the Harry S Truman Building we delivered exterior and interior upgrades, work that has to respect a structure that was already standing and already carrying a name. Our own words for this market are office, multi-family and commercial transformations, and those three phrases cover most of what an owner brings us in a historic shell.
What ties these jobs together is the habit of keeping a building's character in view while the new systems go in. A cornice, a brick bond or a run of original windows is a decision made with the owner, not a surprise found at demolition. Our crews self-perform much of the labor, so those decisions get made by people standing inside the building.
Chapter 03
Money and schedule on an old building
Old buildings move money in unusual ways. The work is often funded in layers, with lenders, equity partners and development incentives all watching the same pay application. Raineri brings construction accounting, lending and development incentives support to the job, so the paperwork a draw needs is ready when the draw is due. Your own tax and financing advisors confirm which programs apply to your project.
Detailed scheduling matters more here than on open ground, because one discovery can ripple through every trade behind it. We build the schedule around the survey findings, sequence the loud and dirty work early, and update it as conditions are exposed. Owners see the same schedule our superintendents use, not a summary written for them after the fact.
You get one point of contact, on site, who answers for the whole job. The Procore portal gives you a 360-degree view of the project: daily logs, drawings, photos, RFIs, schedule and submittals in one place. Historic renovation is a conversation that runs for months, and we keep every part of it in the open.
Real jobs: the Georgian Apartments restoration, Gateway Lofts at 4400 Manchester, the Hadley-Dean Building and exterior and interior upgrades at the Harry S Truman Building.
The then and now of St. Louis brick
A yellow brick corner building at 4101 Laclede and a red brick cornice on the Georgian Apartments are separated by a century and joined by the same material. We build new brick and we restore old brick, and the second skill sharpens the first. A crew that has repointed a hundred-year-old wall knows what a new one should do for the next hundred.
Below are the older buildings we have taken on. If the structure in front of you needs a survey, a plan and a price you can trust, read how we run building construction from preconstruction to closeout, or send us the address through the contact page.
- Georgian ApartmentsFour-storey brick, restored
- Gateway Lofts4400 Manchester
- Hadley-Dean BuildingHistoric renovation
- Hibernia ApartmentsHistoric renovation
- Nash BuildingHistoric renovation
- Harry S Truman BuildingExterior and interior upgrades