Designing Mind

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A graduate of Riverview High School and the Ringling College of Art and Design with two years of industrial design studies at the renowned Art Center College in Pasadena, Calif., Architura’s Ed Eible is a residential designer who’s completed more than 200 residential and commercial projects, primarily high-end homes on Siesta Key. He’s chronicling the renovation of his own ranch-style home in Bayview Heights in a blog called Project Bungalow at sarasotamagazine.com.

My direction was always design: Right out of school, I did some art directing for movies and television, then I designed offshore racing boats for the military and for private boat builders with Michael Peters Yacht Design in Sarasota. Design is design if you’re designing a sneaker or a building. I designed my first project: at age 15 in the family business. [Eible’s mother, Lori, founded the Foxy Lady boutiques.] I designed the St. Armands store [with architect George Palermo], the Mystique store out there and the Sun Bug in Venice. We just completed Shore, a GenX-GenY Tommy Bahama-style place for Tom Leonard on St. Armands. We’re not the strip mall people; we create unique architecture on a small scale. Besides my own house, right now I’m working on: Contemporary waterfront homes on Casey Key and off Camino Real, a bungalow-influenced large home on the Manatee River off Riverview Boulevard and a major residence on Lido. They’re all in the design phase. We just completed: A 7,500-square-foot home for my mom in the Florida-meets-Cape Cod style. Project Bungalow: is finally moving forward. We found more structural issues that were failures of the old structure, so we’re going back and fixing some things; we’ve spent a week bracing, for example. Right now it looks like Beirut. For anyone else about to tackle a home renovation: Consult professionals, and if you’ve never done it before, consult several. Do a master plan that carries you through everything you ever envisioned in the house. Write yourself a project outline and budget those areas, then ask yourself, “What can I hold off on or what can I add in?” —Ilene Denton