Extreme makeover for the Arkansas Times

Larry West is our readers' choice as Best Decorator, so we decided to test his mettle with perhaps the greatest challenge of his 20-year career: re-imagining the Arkansas Times office. If you have never paid a visit to our humble home base, I will briefly paint a picture. The walls veer between drab grey, mustard-beige and off-white imagine a variety of skin tones of sickly men near death. There are stacks of papers and boxes close to the tipping point at every corner; dozens of unused dilapidated chairs; entire walls unadorned by decoration of any kind; a patchwork of well-stained carpets perhaps older than the Times itself; entire rooms used to store things that no current employee claims; fluorescent lights flickering between those familiar middle-school-classroom ceiling tiles. Everywhere: a faint muskiness.

When told of the idea to get an interior design consult from the Best Decorator winner, Times publisher Alan Leveritt said, "That's like taking a city planner to Berlin in 1945."

Upon arriving at Times HQ, West noted that the office environment seemed to be an odd fit with the spirit of the publication.

"When I think of the Arkansas Times, I think of fun, I think of interesting, I think of out of the box," he said. "When I walk off the elevators, that's not what I get. I feel like I'm maybe at the back office at Home Depot."

West noted that, but for one hallway with framed past issues of the Times (more of that, he suggested), the office had mostly blank walls. Meanwhile, he questioned what actually had been put up. A giant calendar ("boring," he said) was tacked to one wall in the meeting room, but was completely blank. "Do you need that?" he asked. I didn't have a good answer. Meanwhile, in our newsroom, West asked about a 4-by-7-foot white poster board, blank, attached to the wall with a mish-mash of tacks and packing tape. After some investigation, it turns out that Times editor Lindsey Millar put it up a year ago in order to project a power point presentation. It hasn't been used since.

"It's called editing," West said. "That's what we call it just like you would call it. Get all that riff raff out. Use the space that you have."

That also means getting rid of what has affectionately become known around the office as the "furniture graveyard": shabby chairs from various decades, the majority of them broken, most of them without owners.

"It just seems gloomy," West said. "Isn't it gloomy to y'all? You can admit it it's boring in here. I would want to work in a place that makes me excited."

For the walls, West suggested framed images classic Times covers, notable photographs from our archives. "I'd have pictures all over the place," he said. "Stuff that's fun. Stuff that's got Arkansas Times written all over it." One staffer's office features a dress that was made out of issues of the Times West heartily approved.

The whole place would get a paint job, West said. "The color is boring in this whole entire space, that's the first thing I think we should change," he said. West sent over suggestions, a vibrant array of oranges, purples, greens and pastel blues. "Something bright and fun and cheery not depressing. I feel like I'm going to jump out a window into the river."

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Extreme makeover for the Arkansas Times