Sharapat Sarsenova and her husband Eric Kessler originally hired me to fully renovate their lovely arts and crafts home on Oliver St in Chevy Chase, DC in 2007. 

Sharapat is originally from Kazakhstan and the two are world travelers. Eric owns Arabella Investments, a company that specializes in helping foundations and individuals to target their philanthropic efforts toward causes that are important to them. Eric is also a former undersecretary of the interior under Abbot.  www.arabellainvestments.com

Over the years I had attended some of Sharapat’s gallery openings and have enjoyed her work for years. We have some in our office on the wall.

But Kathryn, Eric, and Sharapat were not using their garage for cars. They had bikes and seasonal storage there but wanted to try to capture the space for an art studio. We divided the garage into half bicycle and storage and half art studio.  

We ended up re-using the original ceiling boards to build a desk and build the back wall. We solid-stained the existing ceiling structure and added new windows and a new patio door.

We found pipe fittings to support the shelves to give a more urban industrial gallery look and build an art ledge/ shelf out of remaining reclaimed pine from the original flat ceiling of the garage.

We cleaned up and redid the stucco and filled in some sections of the patio to finish off the studio and added track lighting