By ANNEMARIE FRANCZYK

It doesn't take much to get Scott Wood's world turned around.

With one sustained push, an extra tabletop is delivered to the office, a wooden bench seat lines up in front of the TV and an overstuffed couch glides into the kitchen. A little more shoulder, and the arrangement shifts.

You, too, could have this option, if you had a room-sized turntable in the center of your carriage-house apartment.

Wood's place on Norwood Avenue is a nifty example of how an old building with an outdated use can find a new, modern purpose. The city is dotted with them and their owners and occupiers who put in the extra effort and investment to maintain the bricks and mortar of local heritage.

For Wood, and his friend who owns the building he lives in, it comes down to this:

"We like old crap, so if there is a way to salvage it ..." Wood says, his voice trailing.

Where he lives and works his computer-based business was built at the turn of last century as a parking garage. The story goes that carriages would be pulled in and onto the turntable, which would be turned toward an empty parking space. There is evidence of a lift system that suggests carriages also were parked on the second level. It is believed that early automobiles, which had no reverse gear, extended the turntable's usefulness.

The upper level has been converted into a traditional apartment with customary and expected spaces; the lower level is a large, rectangular room with the kitchen, office and living room tucked into the corners and serviced by furniture groupings on the center turntable.

The arrangement is not so much practical as it is a clever conversation piece - the kind you'd expect from a creative sort such as Wood. An interpretive designer and planner with a national reputation, he creates, develops and executes exhibits for visitor centers and museums. This he does amid an assortment of oddball collections, two languid cats and a pair of burbling fish tanks and under a kayak suspended from the ceiling.

"I'm perfectly happy here," Wood says. "This space has positive vibes. I like it so much I think I'm becoming agoraphobic."

Then there are the massive projects, such as real estate developer Rocco Termini's conversion of the 107-year-old Hotel Lafayette into apartments, a boutique hotel, restaurants and retail space.

Termini, through his Signature Development, paid $500,000 for the property earlier this year and is putting $40 million into restoring it. Much of the work will return the bedraggled hotel to its 1904 opulence designed by Louise Blanchard Bethune, the nation's first female professional architect. Some of the work will restore the lobby's Art Deco features that were part of a later renovation.

People who think they know the hotel because they've been to the former Lafayette Tap Room truly don't know it. Even Termini admits to being taken aback yet excited by the amount of lavishness uncovered when his workers started taking down dropped ceilings and drywall.

Here's a taste: There are terrazzo floors, floors with hand-laid stone mosaic tile, intricately carved features on beams and pillars and more detail in molded plaster cornices and archways. There's some evidence of showy scagliola, a technique that gives walls and pillars a look of marble. An original painting by American impressionist painter Abbott Graves decorates a main hallway and two huge marquetry mosaics of Buffalo hang in the lobby.

Termini needs craftsmen, and they're hard to find.

"No young guys know how to do plaster. Drywall, but not plaster," he says.

But he's got experts such as Jim Germain, a 40-year career plasterer with Gypsum Services, who was atop a scaffold smoothing a restored arch in what will be a restaurant. One of his colleagues is 78 years old and has been working with plaster since he was 13. And on a recent morning, Gary Bolles, owner of Buffalo Plastering and Architectural Casting, arrived at the hotel to survey the work ahead of him and his crew.

Termini expects the entire construction and restoration project to be complete by May, but two meeting rooms need to be ready for occupancy by October when the National Trust for Historic Preservation conference comes to Buffalo.

Lynda Schneekloth, a University at Buffalo professor of architecture, has her favorite creative reuses, Ani DiFranco's Babeville in the former Asbury Delaware Church is one. But she takes greater pleasure in buildings that have returned to their original purpose after years of neglect, such as the Guaranty Building and the Lake and Rail grain elevator.

"That means there is an economic driver for that kind of use. Those buildings still have some viability," Schneekloth says. "These are success stories to my mind."

Chuck LaChiusa - a retired teacher and self-ascribed second-career architectural historian - has his favorite reuses. That's significant, given the hundreds of historic buildings he has photographed for his website, www.buffaloah.com.

His first choice: the Buffalo Religious Arts Center, housed in the former St. Francis Xavier Church on East Street in Black Rock, which was closed in 2007.

"We certainly have a problem with closed houses of worship, and this is one way to deal with it," LaChiusa says.

He also likes the 1981 conversion of the former post office to the city campus of Erie Community College and the old Elk Market truck and train terminal into luxury loft apartments in 2002.

"What a lot of guts, what courage to turn something like that into apartments," LaChiusa says. "I think that was a turning point in making people see that there was an economic future in buildings like that. That was the beginning of the whole loft trend.

"The arguments to tear stuff down are weak," he says. "Everyone agrees the real excitement about Buffalo is downtown, and that's because of all the reuse."

It's not all downtown, though. In a suburban reuse project, Iskalo Development Corp. is about to convert the 1834 Mennonite Meeting House at Main Street and North Forest Road into an Evans Bank branch. Iskalo expects to buy the property from the Town of Amherst for $250,000 and put another $250,000 into restoring the windows, replacing the roof and creating office space inside while maintaining the open floor plan.

A developer needs to make a business case for any project, and one of historic scale can add layers of complexity to the process, said President and CEO Paul Iskalo. Location, a sound structure, ceiling height, available parking and environmental issues such as asbestos and soil contamination are among the first considerations in a historic project.

Get beyond those and he says the community has something truly unique: a sense of place.

"Historic architecture defines and differentiates us from everywhere else in the world," he says.

Annemarie Franczyk is a freelance writer.