Upgrading Our Furniture Studio - Welcome to the New Office

We recently took over the neighboring unit in our building! This more than doubled the size of our workshop. We have spent the last few months getting our woodshop upgraded and moved (the most important part of our operation). At last, in the past few weeks, we finally found some time to build a real office and hybrid showroom space.

We were long overdue for a bigger space, so by the time our move was approaching the small “office” that we had was more of a storage unit.

I personally have been very excited for this project, not only because I spend the most time in the office out of anyone here at Sidetracked Workshop, but also because I knew it would be a fun and challenging design project.

The biggest obstacle to the build is that our workshop has a very scarce resource…. DAYLIGHT!

Yes that's right, unfortunately the 1000 sq ft half of the shop that houses our finishing area, shipping station, inventory storage, and this new office only has one source of natural light via a single skylight.

I’ve worked in too many dark, cavernous, windowless workshops in my life, so I was determined to get as much mileage out of this skylight as I could. 

1. Maximize daylight from the skylight

2. Space for a desk, printer, filing cabinet, small fridge, office-y stuff…

3. A showroom area where we can photograph our furniture, show off staged setups, and create social media content. In essence this is more of a virtual showroom, although we do frequently have customer meetings and/or pickups at the workshop. **This is distinct from our sales showroom which currently exists offsite inside the store Urbanite (P.S.… its open 7 days a week in Portland, OR and you can buy our pieces directly off the floor).

4. Not technically a full room in the legal sense - it needs to be made half height walls and not have a door (for fire code, contractor expense, and future proofing reasons). In other words it's a ‘fake room’ or like a movie set.

To address the daylight problem:

1. Using mirrors high up to create a roomier feel and to reflect light. They also draw your eye up, and from many angles you literally see the skylight in the mirrors (putting that 8th grade geometry to use)

2. Sheer curtains from the top of the partition wall to the ceiling: This creates a full height ‘room’, the texture and softness of the curtains feels somewhat ethereal or cloud-like, and in my opinion, helps extend the light and the feeling of ‘sky’ down into the room. It also lets the light from the skylight bleed through into other parts of the workshop, but the curtains still are opaque enough to feel like the walls of the room.

3. Hanging plants and light fixtures high up. I placed these elements ‘too high’ in some sense, but it makes the viewer look up and pulls their attention away from the dark corners of the workshop and towards the light. (And yes I put the plants on pulleys to drop them to the ground for watering)

4. There is a big bright white wall under the skylight. Most of the office is a rich and moody wood paneling, but directly under the skylight this white wall reflects the light back into the room. This wall also serves double duty as a photo backdrop when we need a clean clear background.

How to use the office as a showroom

1. I put all of the ‘office elements’ in 1/3rd of the showroom, so that it can be cropped out from the media side of the room. Additionally we custom built the desk to match our walnut vinyl record cabinet line.The filing cabinet and fridge are red which is the accent color I chose for the space. If you look carefully we actually use some of the lower shelves on a few record cabinets to store some of our office supplies.

2. One of the walls is a pure white wall that has no art hanging on it so that we can photograph our furniture pieces when we need to get a reference photo with a clean background.

3. I tried to create an immersive set to film social media content. For better or worse it's important to our business, so having a dedicated space to photograph staged setups, or weekly ‘vinyl picks’ videos with our crew is a must.

4. I went bold with design: mid-century modern wood paneling, mirrors, bright pops of red in the room, moody accent lighting. I want to make sure the space is unique, and that it has a perspective. Sidetracked Workshop as a brand is stylized, we aren’t trying to take a middle of the road approach to design. We are primarily an online business, this office is our virtual showroom, and I believe that, on the internet, you need to stand out. The internet is a huge place, it is so easy to get buried. I wanted this room to grab attention and make someone look twice. Some people won’t like the style of this showroom. Statistically almost none of our potential customers are going to buy one of our pieces and then put it in a space that looks like this (if your home DOES have wood paneling and a ton of the mirrors on the wall, then send me a photo and I’ll give you a free floating LP shelf). But I do hope that regardless of if you love, hate, can or can’t relate, you at least think it's an interesting and unique space. I’m satisfied with that.