I thought I'd spend the next few days before I leave for the holidays chronicling the process of our studio & storefront buildout (I'll continue on Monday).
We moved into this current space in February 2010 and it took until November to fully complete the project. The time lapse was mainly due to our crazy schedule but we also paced ourselves to budget the cost (we've run our business completely credit & debt free).
The studio is located in the Hannibal Square district of Winter Park- a quaint shopping district with brick streets and cute shops & retaurants. It's one of the nicest parts of town and we were able to secure an amazing rental rate due to the economy. The space is 1500 square feet and we separated about 300 sq. ft. for the storefront. Before this we worked out of another space a few blocks away that was about 700 sq. ft. and before that we were working out of Nathan & I's one bedroom apartment.
photos & sketches by Anna Bond
Throughout the process we worked with our friends Blair & Craig (of the woodcrafting company Hog Eat Hog- the same guys who help us produce our wooden recipe boxes) to complete the buildout. You can see my initial layout sketch for the space above. To keep costs down we kept the concrete floors throughout the studio and laid wood floors only in the storefront area. We also built a walls with an opening in the center to separate the studio area from the shop. The main projects we did for the space were: painting (benjamin moore's ballet white on the walls), added simple wood molding, the separation wall (fully made of wood), wood floors in the front, our custom shelving for the shop, and signage.
Blair is all about using found, salvaged, and local woods so pretty much all of the wood in the space is salvaged from Florida. He also used some unique processes like painting our wood floor with a mix of stain and milk paint and then topped with wax to create a really vintage look that I absolutely love.
photos & sketches by Anna Bond
We worked on getting the studio area set up first and waited a while to complete the storefront since it's not a vital part of our business (it acted as an inventory storage area for quite a while). The studio area is set up as an open room with a large work table in the center for production and desks on either side of the room. The space also has a storage room and a separate office where I work.
My favorite part of the whole space is the custom shelving in the storefront. I worked with Blair to design the card shelves and the built-in shelves around the windows (bottom left image). I love the character they add to the shop.
It's definitely been a process but I love the space and how it turned out! It's very simple, open, and functional for us.
Let me know if you guys have any questions in the comments section... More photos of the completed space & opening party coming next week...
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 at 11:40PM 
