In the beginning of the Spring, we launched a sneak peak into a furnishing & styling project for Articulated’s home workspace and our dining room as a One Room Challenge. You receive the inside scoop on a design project for our dining room and living room flip as well as follow along with our design process. The steps in our design process are always at play, especially when it is for ourselves because there are way more twists and turns to navigate (with creatives who change their mind and know all the options!)

As with most design professionals, the past 2 years’ global supply chain issues have interrupted not only our clients projects, but this project as well. Lead times were expanded and expectations had to be accommodated during challenging market situations. This weeks post is the second of eight weekly posts following the One Room Challenge timeline with a final project reveal, and one bonus article. So enjoy a peak in our space and the process of starting a project with us.

The Consultation

An initial consultation (fully described below) might how we would conventionally begin doing good design work together, but because Corey and I (Andrew) are the clients in this project, let’s skip ahead into the next phase.

Concepts

Visioning Session

In a visioning session, this is where we collect images, source materials, and organize our thoughts about the design work we are about to embark on together. We want to share some vision and direction because ultimately reverse engineering a design project is never a feasible approach to take. We aim to have a strong vision of the project moving forward and depending on the size and scope of the project, this will vary in it’s documentation from the style we’ve presented here to a complex, lengthy written document for a commercial project with many moving parts.

Here are some initial goals and objectives that we identified together:

1. Draw inspiration from the book Bibio Style by Nina Freudenberger and Sadie Stein. The many ways that people live with their treasured volumes is at the heart of this book, including the ancient Parisian apartment with a dining room combined also as a library featured in the inspiration images. (Jackpot!)

1. Flipping our living room into a “dining room” and working home office will increase our working space and better accommodate the new reality of our studio practice activities and business objectives.

2. A work area and dining area focused on the daylighting and views to the beautiful courtyard and large trees will help us with our overall well-being, happiness, and our working goals. Being able to see the daylight change while working will have tremendous benefits on our productivity and motivation.

3. Draw inspiration from our anchor artwork. The Victor Vasarely serigraph “Untitled - Untitled - Purple and Green Abstract from Permutations” (1968) is a treasure for both of us, but mostly for me because I am to re-frame my piece to fit our vision. This may be a bit quirky and odd, but we aim to make this work.

4. Some additional existing artwork may need to be re-framed. Both Corey and I have an extensive collection that is well beyond the walls that we currently have available to us.
   • Our inspirations for this room came from the book Bibio Style by Nina Freudenberger and Sadie Stein. The many ways people live with their treasured volumes is at the heart of this book. Including this ancient Parisian apartment with a dining room combined also as a library. Jackpot!

What’s typical, and not-so- for this project.

Historical Context

The room is in an intact Late-Edwardian 110 year old multi-family residence. The room’s architectural details will become the bones of the room like you see in a contemporary Parisian apartment. Focal points like the bay window and fireplace will be an influencing factor in deciding possible furniture arrangements along with circulation pathways in the room. The space plan will also account for areas to showcase sculptural glass pieces from my collection. Many of them need light and space to be properly showcased. In the case of this project, most of the pieces are existing or will be locally sourced. The items affecting the timeline are the dining table, fabric, and custom upholstery.

functional criteria

Our aim is that the execution of the design is kept as uncomplicated as possible because we are still working out of our home office during the implementation of this project. We are focusing upon working with the existing space parameters and not changing anything structural. So our solutions will come from designing an effective layout and program that utilises our collections as the inspiration for the colour palette. We spend most of our time in a day working and teaching remotely from our workspace, so we need what’s called a “balance of spaces” in zoning and planning arrangements.

contemporary issues

Each project is unique and will have different levels of complexity, especially the work being completed by a contractor. The challenges we are all facing with any projects during this Global Pandemic is that it is may be difficult to maintain pre-determined schedules with start-and-stops, labour shortages, and changes to workplace safety restrictions. Most project teams have had to extend their start dates so that materials have time to arrive so that the most expensive part, the construction phase, is not affected.

Articles in this series