HOT SPRINGS -- In 1986, architects Anthony Taylor and Bob Kempkes set up shop in Hot Springs with the hope of landing a job building a nursing home.
They didn't get it.
"Financially, it was rough times. We didn't have any money," Kempkes says.
"It was basically hand-to-mouth," Taylor adds.
Not long after that disappointment, though, the two principals behind Taylor/Kempkes Architects PA were hired for the job that would get their new firm off the ground.
They were chosen by Mountain Valley Spring Water CEO Brooks Rice to renovate Mountain Valley's building on Central Avenue in downtown Hot Springs. It was the first of many projects that found the two friends and business partners giving new life to historic structures in their adopted hometown and across the state.
On Jan. 25, Kempkes and Taylor were awarded the 2018 Parker Westbrook Award for Lifetime Achievement by Preserve Arkansas, the nonprofit dedicated to preserving the state's architectural heritage and historic sites.
Preserve Arkansas Chairman Rachel Patton says the honor, awarded in 2017 to Little Rock architect Tommy Jameson and presented this year during a ceremony at the Albert Pike Masonic Center in Little Rock, was a no-brainer.
"It was just a matter of time. Their accomplishments are so many that they are well-deserving of the Parker Westbrook Award," she says. "They've done so many projects in Hot Springs and around the state. When they moved to Hot Springs in 1986, nothing was happening downtown. They were real visionaries to get something going and encouraging the rehabilitation of buildings downtown."
Starting out, though, they weren't necessarily looking to be preservationists. They just wanted to be architects in a small town.
FIGURING IT OUT
Taylor and Kempkes are in a conference room in their offices on the third floor of the Weir Building on Central Avenue. It was condemned when they bought the building in 1987. A topless club, Cajun Bog, one of the final vestiges of the city's red-light district, was on the first floor.
"We were the landlords for the strip joint for about four months until we could figure out what to do with the building," Taylor says.
Rolando's Restaurante now occupies the first two floors.
The two friends, who are both married and have children, are seated at a long, bespoke table made of Arkansas walnut with squares covered in worn red leather from Keo. The table was originally made for the Mountain Valley restoration but later ended up back with Taylor and Kempkes.
Taylor is a Magnolia native who grew up in Little Rock, working construction as a teenager.
"Tinkering around with things led to an interest in building and knowing how things were put together," the 63-year-old says. "It was the early '70s and I didn't know what I wanted to do, but it dawned on me that this was something I could enjoy."
Kempkes, 65, grew up in a suburb of Chicago and studied forestry at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, but the science requirements for a forestry degree were daunting.
"There was an insane amount of biology," he says.
When he found out that a dream job in a place like Rocky Mountain National Park was unlikely, he started working construction in Colorado and in Flippin, where his parents were living.
The men met while students at the University of Arkansas School of Architecture, now the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.
They were never in a class taught by Jones, the Pine Bluff native and Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice who was dean of the architecture school, but they did interact with him.
"We would get input from him and talk to him, occasionally go visit a job of his under construction," Taylor says.
Kempkes remembers Jones' insistence that every aspect of building design should have a purpose, like a piece of wood on a plywood door that not only acted as a pull for the door but also reinforced it.
"He would say that you need to have that so the plywood wouldn't warp, but it still looked cool," Kempkes says.
They both acknowledge Jones, whose buildings include Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, as an influence on their design philosophy.
"Basically, it's contextual," Taylor says. "It's a matter of letting the building become what it needs to be for where it is and for its purpose."
"Don't try to force it into something just because you're the architect and you can do that," Kempkes adds. "So many times we see buildings where somebody is trying to make a statement as opposed to just, you know, letting the building be what it is."
THE IDEAL SPOT
After college, Kempkes worked in Colorado for a while and Taylor had a job with an architect in Memphis. They both wanted to return to Arkansas, and Hot Springs seemed like an ideal spot.
"Neither one of us saw our future riding the corporate wheel," Taylor says. "We wanted to get back to a smaller place. I had always run around here when I was in high school. It was my favorite place."
Kempkes remembers a lecture given by Victor Papanek, the Austria-born designer and author of 1971's Design for the Real World.
"He said, 'Go to a small town. You're not going to make a difference in anybody's life in a big city. You can do nice buildings, but in a small town you may be able to have an impact.'"
Not that impact-making was high on their list of priorities.
"It was more of a lifestyle choice," Kempkes says. "We both had families and we liked it and it was small."
In 1986, downtown Hot Springs, despite its charm and history as a resort, was struggling. Only about 30 percent of its storefronts were leased and there was even talk about the city losing its national park certification, Taylor says.
Despite all of that, Mountain Valley's Rice decided to make the company's building at 150 Central Ave. its new showroom and marketing headquarters, and hired the two architects to renovate the Classical Revival-style structure originally built in 1910.
Along with the renovation of the nearby Fordyce Bathhouse by the National Park Service, it helped spark a downtown comeback.
"It was a really big deal," Kempkes says. "They opened simultaneously. It was this huge investment in downtown Hot Springs."
And the project was an education for the two architects.
"Mountain Valley made us experts at restoration," says Taylor, a former chair of the Mid-America Science Museum board of directors and current board member of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. "We'd never done that, and we learned a lot."
One thing they learned was how to find talent in unusual places. For detail work on the first-floor ceiling and stencils of Japanese motifs in the third-floor ballroom, they used an artist whose day job was airbrushing T-shirts at the Hot Springs Mall.
"Everything we did was kind of like that," Kempkes says.
The renovation earned accolades for Taylor/Kempkes, which now has a staff of six, including two additional architects. The National Trust for Historic Preservation gave the firm its 1989 National Preservation Honor Award for the Mountain Valley project, which was completed in 1988.
It also got them more renovation work.
POSTAL TRANSFORMATION
Their next gig involved turning the old U.S. Post Office, a 1903 neoclassical building at 119 Convention Blvd., into headquarters for Selected Funeral and Life Insurance Company.
"The 'before' pictures of that project are pretty incredible," Taylor says.
Walls of red Vermont marble, the same marble used in the U.S. Senate chambers, had been covered for years by cheap sheet paneling; doors of quartersawed oak and brass hinges were painted an ugly, government-issue green. They also discovered a radiator system made of red brass.
"We'd never encountered materials like that before. It was fun to uncover the layers of that building," says Kempkes, who is a member of the State Review Committee for Historic Preservation.
Selected Funeral and Life Insurance Company president Courtney Crouch Jr., hired the pair for the project.
"They're great architects," Crouch says. "They had just completed Mountain Valley and they supervised this restoration. It took two years, and they were able to restore [the building] back to its original grandeur."
Taylor says being hired by Rice and Crouch was a massive boost.
"We were in our early 30s, unproven, and they took a chance on us. They gave us the responsibility of overseeing and designing their corporate headquarters. That was a huge thing, to put that trust in us."
Among the many other Hot Springs projects tackled by Taylor/Kempkes is the restoration of the former Missouri Pacific Depot that was completed in 2002.
They also transformed the Woodmen of the Union building, a hub of the city's black community in the early 20th century, into affordable housing for senior citizens.
The building, originally built as a bathhouse, was black-owned and had been designed by a black man, John Webb, in the early 1920s.
"It was a pretty substantial accomplishment at the time," Kempkes says. "When we got here there was a movement to tear it down."
The pair argued for its preservation and worked with several developers before finally getting the project underway.
"Buildings like these were valuable, they were Hot Springs," Kempkes says. "It took a long time to convince people that this stuff is worth saving."
THE QUAPAW
After almost a decade of negotiation, Kempkes and Taylor partnered with two other investors and signed a 55-year lease with the National Park Service on the Quapaw Bathhouse and Spa, a 24,000-square-foot Spanish Colonial structure built in 1922 that had been vacant for years.
Now it's a place where people can relax in thermal waters and get a spa treatment.
Along with investment banker Robert Zunik, who had heard Taylor give a talk about preservation, they bought the 1913 Thompson Building and the 1904 Dugan-Stewart Building, two of the largest structures on Central Avenue. The Thompson was converted into The Waters, a 62-room boutique hotel and restaurant that opened in 2017 across from Bathhouse Row. Kempkes' wife, Mary Matthews, operates the Blushed Beauty Boutique in the building.
The two, who are both former chairmen of the Hot Springs Historic District Commission, think there is still plenty of potential downtown.
"In our bathhouse sometimes -- I go there a lot early on Sundays -- sometimes English is the third or fourth language I hear. There are Asian people, eastern European coming here," Taylor says.
"You'd be surprised at how many people visit here," Kempkes says. "We have a great advertising and promotion commission and we're becoming a mountain bike center. What we're hearing about is people wanting authentic experiences. This is it. Downtown."
Kempkes jumps in with their vision of the area's future: "The next phase we feel should involve residential space for full-time residents. Then the drugstore comes back, and the green grocer comes back."
Beyond the Spa City, Taylor and Kempkes have worked on preservation projects in Helena-West Helena, where they resurrected the old Helena High School building -- which had been vacant and crumbling for decades -- as affordable housing. They also worked on the Lepanto commercial district and the 1888 Powhatan Courthouse in Lawrence County.
Reflecting on the impact of architectural restoration, Taylor says: "We build what we are. The structures that exist are part and parcel of the story of us as a people. If we don't allow them to remain, then we've lost part of our own story. They don't have to be absolutely preserved intact -- they can move with the times -- but the essence of their character needs to remain as part of the fabric of our society."
Preserve Arkansas' Patton, who is particularly fond of their work on the Thompson Building, gives the two credit for their ability to see promise where many just see run-down eyesores.
"Their work is so important. Not every architect can see a building like the Helena High School coming back to life. Have you seen the 'before' pictures of that building?"
They've been acknowledged for their work by Preserve Arkansas in the past, and have attended plenty of awards ceremonies, but getting a lifetime achievement award doesn't mean they're slowing down.
"It's obviously an honor," Taylor says, "but we're not done yet."
Style on 02/03/2019