While our main focus as a house-flipping duo is indeed doing up entire houses, every so often a challenging side-project pops up which we just can’t say no to, a recent one of which was the opportunity to do up a studio apartment for a recently qualified yoga instructor who wanted to open up her own practice. The dilemma? — She only had her studio apartment as a possible venue to receive clients in, but fortunately it was indeed a city studio apartment and had a good volume to it.
Inside the apartment
More of the same was effected inside the studio apartment space — lighting is all we really used to alternate between a professional working space and one which assumes more of a cosy feel. This time we used different coloured ceiling LED lamps, all of which we sourced from the Mazzola Lighting online store, with nifty little tricks like illuminating the wall-mounted clock for our little “instructor” to keep track of the time without giving too much away as well as literally just changing the light settings once the clients are away to create a cosier feel to the interior space.
I’m more than happy to share exactly how we went about professionalising it, quite simply because such projects are often unique, one-of-a-kind projects and in our decoration of the studio apartment we had to maintain a fine balance between creating a functional workspace, but one which can be turned right back into a cosy home at the flick of a switch.
The “at-the-flick-of-a-switch” bit of the brief should be taken literally because that’s exactly how we managed to make it easily and quickly transformable — we used lighting. More on that in a bit however, for now I’ll get into how we went about adding that professional feel to what is otherwise someone’s full-time home as well.
A Dynamic “Reception Area”
This was quite a tricky effect to achieve. Being a studio apartment, the client’s entrance looked like that of every other unit in the apartment block, but fortunately there’s a bit of a passageway which leads into the entrance. We installed some contemporary-styled wall decking which has a bit more of a silver/grey colour scheme, so it looks like some wood found in some faraway place and yet at the same time you have to look really close to realise that it’s actually wood.
We then dotted the decked wall with motion sensing Eglo Helsinki outdoor wall lamps as well as installing white ceiling LED lamps which you don’t notice until they come on as they blend right in with the white ceiling, also connected to some motion-sensing tech. When clients come over for a session, the wall lamps are lit up to create an inviting effect and when the client leaves at the end of the session, the ceiling lamps are lit instead of the wall lamps to create the effect that “it’s always better coming than it is going” as the ceiling lights offer nothing special by way of their effect and serve nothing more than to illuminate the hallway.
