The general's office

[Photo: Deranian-Noble Design Group] Gen. Tommy Franks congratulates Linda Noble Welch and Mardi Deranian, the St. Petersburg design team that created his mobile command center last summer at the Raytheon plant in St. Petersburg.

By JUDY STARK, Times Homes Editor
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 27, 2003

Sandbags and camouflage? Not exactly. Thanks to two St. Petersburg interior designers, Gen. Tommy Franks has a stylish portable command center - complete with leather sofa and silky drapes.

Gen. Tommy Franks may be running the war against Iraq from an office in Qatar designed by a pair of St. Petersburg interior designers.

In a whirlwind three weeks last summer, Linda Noble Welch and Mardi Deranian of Deranian-Noble Design Group transformed a giant shipping container into a portable command center for Franks.

"It was a unique job," said Deranian, the dean of interior designers in the Tampa Bay area.

The container, at 17 by 21 feet, looks something like a boxcar. The walls, ceiling and floors collapse for shipping and storage so the whole unit is just 8 feet thick. The interior ceiling, wall and floor coverings are removable, and are packed and numbered so crews of soldiers can reassemble the office and reinstall all the interior trim and finish work and set up the furniture in three hours or less.

Welch got a call late one afternoon last summer saying that she and Deranian, both members of the American Society of Interior Designers, had been recommended by another designer and asking if she could be at a meeting the next morning at 9 to discuss designing the office. At that meeting, "They said they needed an executive office in three weeks, and they told us who it was for," she said.

In a desert, air conditioning these boxcars is important, and that meant the interior acoustics were key, Welch said: The air-conditioning units "are so loud you can't hear inside it." The design team used padded foam-board acoustical panels, similar to what they use in home media rooms, covered in a gold-tone jacquard fabric to deaden the sound; acoustical tile on the ceilings; and a portable parquet floor similar to a movable dance floor. (Welch called the St. Petersburg Yacht Club to find out where they got theirs.) To accommodate computer cables and other wiring, they attached crown molding and baseboard with hook-and-loop fasteners and ran the cables behind them.

Government officials ordered the desk and conference table from which Franks will run the war, but Deranian-Noble ordered the custom-dyed Burgundy leather sleep sofa with baseball stitching in case the general needs to catch a few winks on the job.

Inches counted. The height of the portable command center is 6 feet 8 inches, and the general is 6 feet 3, so flooring and ceiling tiles could not take up much space.

Welch said she chose gold for the walls to keep the office light and bright. She inquired about the general's likes and dislikes and what his office at Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base looked like. She learned that he likes Oriental rugs, but this portable office is without one.

The portable office is windowless, so to eliminate claustrophobia and give the illusion of windows, the designers hung neutral, silk-like draperies over mechanical panels and other breaks in the metal walls.

The work was done last summer at Raytheon in St. Petersburg, where soldiers from CentCom, using similar big shipping containers, constructed a prototype of a high-tech, highly portable nerve center for war in the 21st century. The portable complex is known as a deployable joint command and control, or DJC2. After 9/11, the Pentagon had begun building portable military headquarters that could be instantly deployed on ground, sea or in the air, in a time of crisis.

Inside the completed office for Franks, "you could hear each other talk," Welch said. "All the noise wasn't bothersome, and that was a big goal: to make it functional, but to make it look very nice at the same time."

Welch said she didn't know what the work cost. She said a friend reported seeing something on CNN the other day that looked like the Franks office.

When the job was finished last September, Franks came to the Raytheon plant near Tyrone Square Mall where the work was done on this and other elements of the DJC2, "and shook our hands and said, 'Job well done,' " Welch recalled. "It was a great experience. He was very genuine."

The general was "obviously real pleased," Welch said: He was apparently expecting something along the lines of sandbags and camouflage, "and never thought it would look so nice."

"The thought was that heads of state might be invited there," Deranian said, "so it couldn't look too crude."

-- Information from Times files was used in this report.

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