Morphing HotDesign section to Wellness

I like a couple things about HotDesign (primarily the 'Open' at the very top), and I like the overall look of Wellness...

Anyway for a moderately skilled newbie to add HotDesign's drop down segment into Wellness?

Well probably yes, you could copy top panel part and define new module positions for it. Open/Close can be done using jQuery animation , but the tricky part may be if opening of panel conflicts the rest of page layout, so you would probably need to adjust some things in template.