MAY 2006
Gartrell Constructs Edifices for the Other Blue and Gold
Lydia Gartrell, MBA ’92
by Margaret Steen
As Ikea expands on the West Coast, Lydia Gartrell, MBA’92, manages
construction on new stores, including East Palo Alto.
Photo by
Saul Bromberger/
Sandra Hoover Photography
When Lydia Gartrell, MBA ’92, joined Ikea to oversee construction of the store it was building in her hometown of East Palo Alto, Calif., she was given a budget, an opening date, and a directive to meet Ikea’s standards. She also had lots of leeway to get the job done. She liked the company’s entrepreneurial atmosphere, as well as the technical challenge: Because space was limited, the parking garage wraps around the store. The meeting of the parking garage’s concrete and the store’s metal panels creates “opportunities for leaking and things settling differently,” Gartrell says.
The path that led Gartrell to her position as a construction manager for Ikea began with her parents: Her father worked in civil engineering in the Air Force.
And she never got the sense that it would be difficult for an African American woman to succeed in a field traditionally dominated by white men.
“My parents never put any limits on what was possible,” she says.
So on her first day at the University of Southern California, when she had to declare a technical major in order to receive an ROTC scholarship, she chose architectural engineering. “I liked the combination of the art and the science,” she says.
After spending more than five years in the Air Force managing construction projects, Gartrell worked in corporate and consulting jobs before joining Ikea in 2002. She oversees construction of Ikea’s stores in the Northwest, including planning for future stores in Portland, Ore., and Dublin, Calif. Recently her focus has been a 265,000-square-foot store in West Sacramento, Calif.
Gartrell started her work before the land was purchased by helping to estimate the cost of building on the site. Hiring the architect and engineering design teams, she made sure their work reflected Ikea’s standards but also would meet local building codes. She also hired the general contractor and managed the construction process.
As the clock ticked toward opening day, she worried about details like why a fire sprinkler pump wasn’t working. (The culprit: faulty valves, which were promptly replaced.)
Still, she exuded calm. Ikea doesn’t publicly announce opening dates for stores until they’re past the point where bad weather could cause delays.
“Everything else is pretty much controllable,” she says.
