Interior Design in “Unprecedented Times”
By Bruno Povejsil, studiobstyle guest blogger
The social distancing era has taken its toll on the design and staging business, just as COVID-19 has changed so many other workplaces and lifestyles. We’ve had to re-evaluate what we can and can’t do while minimizing the risk of infection to ourselves and the wonderful people we work with. As it turns out, a lot of things we do depend on being able to work with a crew! If we want to stage a scene for a photoshoot, we have to let a crew go into the studio and build a set, then wait a whole day, if not longer, for the dust(and potentially viral droplets) to settle before we can go in and shoot.
Rather than force ourselves into situations where we have to throw away whole days of valuable production time, we’ve been working on other projects. Our most involved work over the last few months has been on remodeling a Lake Minnetonka house in preparation for its market debut this week!
The house has a lot of factors working in its favor to begin with: lakeside property, tons of space, and big windows for natural lighting, just to name a few. Still, there’s no accounting for the high standards of house seekers, and we needed to take the house to the next level, even in the middle of a quarantine, with only a handful of people. Fortunately, our deadlines got pushed way back thanks to the lockdown, which made safety easy to prioritize over speed.
We started small. Tasks like replacing hardware on cabinets, weeding the gardens, and painting bedrooms can be done by one or two people while leaving plenty of distance. New furniture and large painting jobs still needed outside help, but we could stay safe and count on having time to disinfect the house between crews. We turned an annoying delay into an opportunity to work carefully and closely on something that’s sure to make a home buyer happy and show off studiobstyle’s staging and design talents.
We are not the only ones working on houses and homes during the pandemic. As Barbara learned the hard way, hardware stores have been selling out of components and tools at record rates as people confined to their homes decide to take some time to update their new workspace or catch up on long-put-off improvements and fixes. It makes perfect sense, of course: DIY projects and remodeling adventures that a small group can do are perfectly safe from a COVID perspective, since your house will contain all the manpower you need!
From a designer’s perspective, what does it mean that more people are opting for DIY home improvement? We’re still waiting to see a concrete answer to that. I think there will always be a place for the work that studiobstyle does, especially as the economy recovers and more people look for a professional touch to finish off their home office and other projects. We are sure to see more studio time soon, as people are looking for DIY inspiration and design brands are looking for people to inspire, and we specialize in getting those groups together.
If you’re looking for the perfect build-around centerpiece or need hard-to-find decor to complete your DIY dream project, take a look at studiobstylehome and keep an eye out for our upcoming fashion store!