Sherwin's Sheraton

Before moving to St. Louis in August of 2012 I knew very little about the city. I had driven through it many times but I didn't have any contacts here so never stopped. My total experience in St. Louis was the sum of two weekend trips. One trip was taken when I was too young to remember, and the other when I was a teenager and was too distracted to pay attention. 

Of all the fantastic architecture in St. Louis the only building I could ever recall was the painted one. I am referring to what is now the Sheraton Hotel in downtown St. Louis. This 13-story building is covered on three sides with a colossal 110,000 square-foot mural. The work, created by Richard Haas in 1984, isn't my favorite but it adds an unexpected richness to an otherwise dull exterior. Because I get curious about such things, I used the Sherwin-Williams paint calculator to get an estimate of the amount of paint it would take to create the mural. The answer is 315 gallons per coat. Somehow that feels like a low-ball of an estimate. [shrug] Regardless, upkeep on all that paint must be expensive, I would have gone with vinyl siding.