Downtown Memphis can get ready for a long overdue face lift. The sought-after architectural designer Christopher Speltz has taken on the revamping project and Memphis movers are excited to see what this will mean for current and future residents of the city.

According to Speltz, “we’re taking these buildings that were kind of left for dead. When I started designing 266, it kind of dawned on me that this is a city block. This isn’t a building Downtown that’s 40 feet wide by two stories. This is from Dr. M.L. King Jr. Avenue to Pontotoc Avenue to South Front, and the scale is just really big.”

He further expressed that he has thought the downtown area of Memphis has needed an update for quite some time. His vision includes making the area a hub of activity for the young and ‘hip’ community of Memphis, perhaps making it attractive for millennials to move to Memphis.

Speltz further elaborates on his renovating plan by sharing that, “you start taking old parking lots and turning them into these really cool buildings and things like that, and that creates a threshold from the next street to the next street to the next. I love that, and I hope all the other architects are doing the exact same thing.”

However, this is not the first time that he has created plans like this for Memphis. Having been born and raised in Memphis, Speltz drew a lot of inspiration from the city he grew up in, when attending the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture over 25 years ago. As a graduate student, his graduate project focused on revitalizing downtown Memphis. Despite his professors disagreeing that the project could be done, Speltz says that he wants to call those same professors today and tell them that, “not only did I try to design it, I’m kind of living it.”