Foundation director Stephen Thompson says board members encouraged the Utah Heritage Foundation to hold a conference, with classes, to help educate the public. He thinks the classes on making your home or small business more energy-efficient are especially important.

In featuring the Gateway neighborhood of Salt Lake, the Heritage Foundation tour guides will ask visitors to envision the neighborhood as it was in 1870, when the first railroad trains came through town. That's when the west side began to transform itself — adding warehouses and hotels.

The Gillies, Stranksy, Brems, Smith Architects office, at 375 W. 200 South, is also a stop on the tour. Stephen B. Smith, one of the building's owners and a partner in GSBS, says the building began life in 1898, as Wilber Henderson's wholesale grocery. Three of the five buildings on the block, including the Henderson grocery, were designed by one of the state's premiere architects, Walter Ware, who practiced in Salt Lake for 60 years.

Ware designed many other buildings, too, including First Presbyterian Church (among other Presbyterian churches around the state) and Westminster College's Converse Hall. The sandstone Henderson building is unusually attractive for a warehouse, with its Roman arches, tin cornices and other details. It cost $20,000 to build.

Smith likes to trace its history, talking about how in 1932 the Henderson family leased the building to the state to be used for a liquor warehouse and how Clark Leaming, owner of a furniture store, bought the warehouse in 1977 and began to rehabilitate it.

Smith served on the Heritage Foundation board at that time and knows how nicely the Leamings restored the building. "We gave it an award," Smith recalls. He thought at the time, "This is a way cool building." About 15 years later, when it came up for sale, Smith would have loved to have bought it. However, in the early '90s his firm had only 25 employees and the space was too big and too expensive for their needs.

So the Henderson building became a restaurant and brewery, and Smith credits the owners of Fuggles for keeping it up quite well. By the time the building came on the market again, in1998, GSBS Architects had grown.

Today 70 employees work there. Most sit at desks arranged within a central square, a space lit by skylights and set a few feet lower than the surrounding floor. The architects work in what was once the bay next to the docks, where, after a remodel in 1931, trucks could pull in.