Dear Friends,

If you joined us at our recent event, thank you for participating in the Traditional Building Exhibition and Conference. It was our biggest and best fall show ever!

The show and conference in New Orleans concluded on Oct. 19, a beautiful Saturday afternoon, with the announcement of the Traditional Building Design Challenge winner (Sam Gianukos of Houston-based Creole Design) and the award of the period house plan to Mrs. Sandra Robinson, a resident of New Orleans’s historic Holy Cross neighborhood whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Working with the non-profit Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, Mrs. Robinson will be able to rebuild the house, where she had lived with her elderly mother and sister. She is looking forward to reuniting her family under one roof in Gianukos’s lovely new old house design.

Our show’s Gumbo Gala , held on Thursday night Oct. 17, was also in Holy Cross, home to the Operation Comeback House, an 1870 shotgun that the Traditional Building Show and partners restored from near ruin. Holy Cross is one of several lower Ninth Ward neighborhoods that are struggling valiantly to rebound from the storm. The Comeback House has been an inspiration to all of us: volunteers, product donors, out-of- town attendees at the show, local residents, and the media. It was covered by NBC-TV, Fox News Radio, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Old-House Journal’s New Old House magazine, “Preservation In Print,” New Orleans Homes & Lifestyles magazine, and Restore Media's own Period Homes magazine. Tours of the house during the Traditional Building Show were very successful. Our gratitude to all who pitched in!

The New Orleans Traditional Building Exhibition and Conference is a great example of how by doing good, we do well. It is important to the city of New Orleans and to the storm-ravaged region that the rest of the country lend a hand by contributing to and investing in the local and regional economy. With your help, we did our part.  Now, as the region restores, rebuilds, and revitalizes, it is better informed by the traditional building methods and materials brought to the show by hundreds of companies and expert individuals. Prior to Katrina, New Orleans’s peak year for construction was 1984, when an oil boom provided $8 billion in construction funding to the metro area’s economy. Now, post-Katrina, there is $28 billion in the funding pipeline. As a result, the city and the region will have a construction economy for many years to come.

We received great support in New Orleans from many, many traditional building industry associations and other organizations, some of which co-located their annual meetings at the New Orleans show. I want to thank the AIA Historic Resources Committee; the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America; the American Institute of Building Design; the New Urban Guild; the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans; the Louisiana Recovery Authority; the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism; the General Services Administration; and the National Park Service. Each of these organizations provided at least one speaker at the conference. Many thanks to them for their time and expertise.

And special thanks to our exhibitors, who invest time and resources to display products and services as part of the educational offering at the Traditional Building Show. I encourage attendees to remain engaged with our exhibitors, whose commitment to serving your particular traditional building needs is sincere and unparalleled.

I hope to see you at our next Traditional Building Show, in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, March 12-15, 2008.  For additional reports on the New Orleans event and a preview of the upcoming show in Boston 2008, visit www.traditionalbuildingshow.com, or call me directly at 202-339-0744, ext. 104.

Best,

Pete

Peter H. Miller
President
Restore Media, LLC