Mr. Fix-It : * Shelter: Bob Reid left his lucrative career as a developer to restore a historic hotel complex as a haven for homeless women.

The surgeon was boring a hole in Bob Reid’s head when Reid heard the nurse announce that his vital signs were going flat.

Although he felt nothing, he heard all as the anesthesia was wearing off. “I was terrified,” he recalls. “I was convinced that I was going to die.”

It was a moment that changed Reid’s life. When he recovered from the infection that had threatened his brain, he says he “realized I had to do something that was real for a change. I was sick of false material values. I had my big, comfortable house, and I felt it was time to give something back.”

So in 1989, Reid, a six-figure-a-year real estate developer, walked away from his lucrative profession and went to work as director of the Sunshine Mission, a homeless shelter for women in South-Central Los Angeles.

His specialty had been restoring historical houses that he sold for more than half a million dollars; now his masterwork was a series of ramshackle buildings on the cusp of a neighborhood blighted by decay. His former clients drove Jaguars and Mercedes; his new clients carried their worldly possessions in plastic garbage bags.

But in his own eyes, Reid was still “a fix-it man.”

By fixing up the Sunshine Mission, he hoped he would help its tenants repair their lives. But Reid, who began volunteering for the mission 12 years ago, was not thinking about the sort of quick cosmetics most shelters receive.

Built in 1892, the Sunshine Mission complex is a historical landmark whose restoration is governed by architectural codes to preserve its authenticity. As far as possible, Reid intends to meet those requirements, just as he would for a Craftsman or Victorian mansion.

He’s not “gold-plating” the project, he hastily demurs. The Sunshine--formerly Casa de Rosas, a 1920s tourist hotel--will not be resuscitated as a Ritz of Skid Row.

But while most shelters offer four walls and a grid of beds, the renovated Sunshine will give its 74 clients pink wallpaper, brick fireplaces, turn-of-the-century art glass in the windows and fresh white cafe curtains.

Reid is midway through restoring the shelter’s 56 hotel rooms, whose $290-a-month rent pays for the mission operations; he’s hunting up beds and dressers for the dorm rooms, which the local chapter of the American Society of Interior Decorators spruced up two years ago, and he is seeking funding to finish the public rooms.

“It’s not hard to do,” declares the 37-year-old director, whose shelter has received more than $2 million in funding from the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency and the California Housing Rehabilitation Program.

In its spending power, the Sunshine appears to be unique. “The typical shelter takes a building as is and puts in beds and some rehabilitation work, if necessary,” says Jeff Schaffer, associate director of the Shelter Partnership, a countywide consulting group that assists new facilities. “Basically, the idea is to provide services as inexpensively as possible.”

The Sunshine project, he notes, “has gone far beyond what other shelters are able to do. . . ..They’ve made a special effort to restore the building to its previous appearance. Such rehabilitation work is on the wish lists of what other shelters would like to do.”

Sitting in his office at the Sunshine Mission, Reid is a far cry from the 1960s stereotype of long-haired, sandal-wearing Samaritans. Instead, he could have stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad--the roomy striped shirt, teal green turtleneck, wide-pleated pants, thin-rimmed burgundy glasses and stylishly clipped locks tousled lightly close to his forehead.

In classic yuppie style, he, his wife, Debbie, and their two young daughters live in the ersatz bucolic setting of Mt. Washington, among a gaggle of neighbors prominent in business and politics. Reid bills the mission $700 a week for his services. His family’s income is augmented by outside investments and his wife’s salary.

The son of a San Francisco cabinetmaker, he has been hooked on the mission at the corner of Adams Boulevard and Hoover Street ever since he was an architecture student at USC. Built in the Spanish Mission style with Craftsman accents, the cluster of small buildings, with their arches, courtyards and shaded patios, had that “Ah!” quality, he says, that sent him into aesthetic rapture and made him determined to give the facility new life.

The project was not going to be easy, however. Most people he talked to, he says, told him, “You’re really taking on a lost cause.”

By the time Reid became the mission director in 1989, the shelter, run by an evangelical religious group, had been badly damaged by arson fires and had no funds for reconstruction work. What money they had came from such endeavors as monthly yard sales and the odd charitable contribution.

And, just incidentally, there were 30,000 square feet of buildings to renovate.

To beat the stiff competition for funding, Reid reasoned, “We had to look better than other shelters.”

With his grant money guaranteed, Reid is going after private donations.

Some potential supporters have criticized his goal of high-quality restoration, he says. “Many people feel that homeless women and men don’t deserve that. They say, ‘It sounds like you’re giving them a vacation.’ ”

Reid adamantly defends his clientele. Many of the women at Sunshine have arrived with the recession, he says. About a third are the spouses of farmers and laid-off factory workers from the Midwest who were drawn here seeking work. Others have lost their homes because of major medical expenses or have been evicted from welfare hotels.

By the time they find their way to Sunshine, often after months on the streets, many are suffering from mental illnesses or drug abuse. They like the shelter’s homey touches--the pink wallpaper and pastel pictures of flowers.

“It looks just like I’d do my own room,” says Mary Washington, who’s been at the Sunshine for a week. Only, she adds, “this is prettier” than the room she had as a child.

“The women are really jazzed, “ says Denise Fayer, the mission’s caseworker. “They bring in little flowers and put them in cups on their night stands. And their bed areas are always picked up.”

According to Mike Neely, director of the Homeless Outreach Program, a citywide referral group, the beneficial effect of decorations cannot be overestimated.

“You can’t have too many frills,” he says. “If you want people to lead a normal existence, you have to give them as normal a setting as you possibly can.”

The setting Reid envisions would sound normal even to the city’s poshest decorators. He speaks of the dirt yard between the buildings as “the commons,” where a rose garden and reflecting pond soon will be landscaped.

The colored art glass from the Craftsman period, which borders the entrances, is to be cleaned or replaced and the hardware-store imitation panes disposed of. “It just doesn’t look right,” Reid protests.

Already, apprentices of the painters union have given a new coat of paint to the commissary and the carpenters union has unboarded the original arched brick fireplaces, while film industry volunteers have been cleaning the woodwork in the dining room.

Institutions have contributed material free or at cost--metal bed frames from USC, Sinclair paint and dining room tables and chairs from Good Samaritan Hospital--while artists have given their time. Feminist choreographer Sarah Elgart teaches the homeless women dance and movement classes on Saturday mornings.

And Reid has gotten a former publicist for the Museum of Contemporary Art to do pro bono promotion for a June 27 fund-raising event, when the mission’s 1930s chairs, decorated by local artists, will be auctioned off at the Daniel Saxon Gallery.

Does he worry about losing the much-needed furniture? No, says the fix-it man with the magic touch: “You just throw out the old stuff and new stuff starts flowing in.”