Week 7: A New Face

This Week’s Activities:

This was a very low key week at Lauderdale Design Group. Joy was out of the office enjoying some vacation time, and we were so happy to welcome Jess King back for a month or so in preparation for Deborah going on maternity leave. I had never met Jess, though she was in the program at UT while I was a freshman. I was so happy to meet her and she is truly an inspiration for all interior design students. I’ll go into more details later in my introduction!

Great addition to LDG's materials library, a book of awesome rugs. I learned something new this week about product manufacturer’s... when once company comes out with new products, they ALL do. Yes, just like clothing stores, product manufacturers have new lines that come out at the end of summer, just in time for the fall and winter season. My inbox was full of emails from product rep’s wanting to set up meetings with the LDG design girls to go over their newest products. I spent a big chunk of time working around everyone’s busy schedule to set up rep meetings. We also had quite a few reps come into the office this week with new products. We had a great lunch meeting with Alli Mair, of mohawk, who showed us some great new carpet samples. We also had a really fun meeting with Jennifer Mullins, the rep for 3form. 3form has some amazing new products coming out and some great design ideas. All of their products have a great story behind the design concept. We met with many more reps than this, but those two had my favorite products! I am so lucky to meet all these great product reps and learn about the different product manufacturers in the design industry. As the student chapter president of ASID, I look forward to using my new connections to make our annual vendor show truly spectacular this year!

Materials for higher education/hospitality projectCathy was out of the office this week so I took over answering the phones, and some of the office chores that she usually attends to. It made me realize how much she truly does for us. I watered the plants, took out the trash and recycling, checked the mail, and emptied staff trash cans. I actually enjoyed doing these small tasks, and the way our office is set up, makes it extremely easy to keep the place in tip top shape. 

I spent a large chunk of time continuing with the LDG laundry room project this week as well. Joy wanted me to present what I had come up with when she returns from vacation this Monday, so I was busy at work. I asked Dani what I needed to have, which ended up being floor plans, and elevations, spec sheets for products used, and a price sheet. Last week I came up with multiple different floor plans using a couple different products. So this week I narrowed it down to one and created a final floor plan, as well as elevations that show what each wall in the space will look like. I also picked out my final products, and printed out the sheets. Pricing the laundry room was fairly easy and I look forward to hearing what Joy has to say about what I have to show her! 

This Week’s Focus:

The relationships Lauderdale Design Group produce through staff/client interaction are the most important that they have as a firm. Much of their work comes through referral and repeat clients. LDG keeps project records for ten or more years after the project is finished. It is their responsibility to maintain the information relevant to a project. Samples are the most important because LDG is the one responsible for archiving the materials used on the projects. Follow-up appointments after project completion are encouraged and clients are always welcome to contact with question or concerns after completion of project. In the design industry, a designer never stops growing and learning. Every project is different, requiring varied skill sets. A LDG client, who oversees many projects always says “I don’t mind learning something on a project. I just don’t want to re-learn it on the next project.” Mistakes are inevitable, but designers should learn from them and avoid making the same mistake in the future. That is one of the many ways LDG designers learn from projects. It is important to LDG to stay connected with clients from completed projects. They like to have repeat clients, and stay on projects. After a project is finished, future updates will be charged as add service or as a new project entirely. LDG works with many of their clients long after project completion. Lauderdale works in corporate, hospitality, higher education, and residential facility types, with a wide range of client types.

This Week’s Introduction:

Jess King, Designer, LDGThis week I am introducing Jess King. Jess has been working as a intern and designer at Lauderdale Design Group on and off for over a year. She has rejoined the team this week to stay for a month in preparation for Deborah leaving on maternity leave. Jess is from Philadelphia, PA. She chose to study interior design not really knowing what it entailed but thinking it could be a fun career path. She visited The University of Tennessee-Knoxville campus and fell in love with the art + architecture building. It was one of the more affordable schools she toured as an out of state student that she was accepted to. Upon her graduation from UTK she decided to go on to pursue a masters degree in architecture at The University of Texas. She has a great desire to teach and was craving to know more about this career path. Interior Design was fascinating to Jess but she needed to know about the bigger picture. She has work experience as a intern for UTK professor Barbara Klinkhammer, doing drawings for Barbara’s book being a color theory TA. Some of her hobbies include reading, traveling, playing the piano, and being with friends. 

Week 7: Humes House

Door Hardware in the Salvage RoomFinancial Aspects

There are not often project fees for Knox Heritage. It differs from the typical firm or designer because a firm for example typically would has a client aimed business. Knox Heritage has a focus on restoring and maintaining history.

Knox Heritage is a non-profit business. Therefore it mostly relies on donors and grants. For example the Salvage Room receives all of its inventory from donations. The money made in the Salvage Room goes back to Knox Heritage.

This Week

The most interesting thing I worked on this week was doing research on the Humes House. We have pieces of the Humes House in the Salvage Room. It was one of the four most important historic houses in Knoxville. I learned about the history of the house and Thomas Humes who had it built. Thomas Humes was the first president of the University of Tennessee. He also was an important figure in Knoxville in many subjects. The house was torn down in the 1980s. A man named Bill Powell saved the pieces from the house with intentions of rebuilding it. However the house has still not been rebuilt.

I also finished my as-built drawings of the Fowler’s Mill this week. I also worked on inventory, price research, Nostalgia, and Westwood.

Salvage Room sign at NostalgiaNew Person

This week I am going to introduce Jeff. He is the manager of Nostalgia. He is kindly donating an area in Nostalgia for the Salvage Room to use. He has helped me several times when I am doing difficult tasks at Nostalgia. He has helped me carry large items and hang items out of my reach. He has an appreciation for vintage and historic items.

Week 7: Holiday Week

This was surprisingly actually busier than last week, even with it being a holiday and everything! I continued to work on the Sewanee Inn spec binders which were finalized and sent out on Wednesday! I think that stuffed about 400 plastic dividers sheets if not more! But it was amazing to see how much goes into the spec binders for hospitality design and that the Sewanee Inn is just a small hotel with around 40 rooms, I can only imagine how big of a project it would be with a Hilton! I spent Monday and Tuesday working on spec binders pretty much all day long and ordering more fabrics that had to replace the fabrics I was cutting and putting into the spec binders. Wednesday I was helping finalize everything but it was pretty much a wrap by then. So I helped the other interns prepare for two projects that had to be sent out that day. One project was for Northside Hospital, this was kind of crazy because we had been working on this project then had kind of paused on the project and then the director miscommunicated with the designer and called about us having boards ready for by Monday. The designer handled it really well and we pulled together what we had, which turned out to be everything (only because we took some samples from the contractor binders) but Anna through the boards together in two hours (seriously, she's great at what she does!) then we printed off labels, found packages and sent the boards off around 4 o'clock. Then Lauren was working on another project for Shanadoe. Lauren was photoshopping more photos for the presentation boards and I had to pack up all the samples and make a list in case they liked any of the samples and wanted to keep them. Materials got packed away and boards got put together and we sent it out at 5:30! We also had to get creative because we ran out of bubble wrap, so we resourcefully used our recycled paper. (Go green!) We had Thursday off and then the majority of the staff took Friday off too, but we did not. Lauren and I came back in on Friday and immediately began working on another set of finish boards and contractor boards. We spent the whole day putting together three finish boards and then started ordering materials for another set of boards. That pretty much sums up my holiday week!

Highlighting Floor Plan for materials

This week we talked about the client/staff relationship and what that looks like for ESa. ESa works mostly with healthcare clients and a large percent of the projects they work on our continuious rennovations to these facilities through out the years. The productivity assesments for clients and square footage ratio has been used in previous projects with ESa, though they do not use these methods everytime and on every project. When designers work with clients they go through many formal and informal meetings to better understand what they want from their project and decisions are made during each of these visits. Not to mention lots of e-mails and phone conversations with their clients. I know a lot of the designers will pull things such as different paints and have them sent off to their client to okay to help them move in a different direction. Obviously in design the client/staff relationship is incredibly important to the company and they do their best to fix all issues that come about on the job and after the job, especially since they always want the client to be able to call if they need more work to be done. A way they effectively do this is the way they pair different designers and architects together as a team. In most case their is one designer that has been their for more years and a new designer that are paired together to work on the designs, the same thing goes with architects. Not every project is like this, but in doing this it enables the newer designers and architects to learn the ways around meetings and working with clients.

This week I wanted to introduce you to Sarah Woodard. Sarah is a hospitality designer for ESa and she is one of the designer I worked with on the Sewanee Inn project. Sarah is a wonderful part of the ESa team, particularly in luncheons and informals because she always has questions for the products being shown and she isn't afraid to give her opinion. Before Sarah worked at ESa she was a bartender, which works very well in getting along with clients. Sarah went back to Watkins School of Design after over 10 years of bar tending. Sarah has one daughter and spend her spare taking her on really exciting trips. She left town on Wednesday to take her to California, where they are renting a car and driving up the coast! I love working with Sarah because she is always willing to give you the wisdom she has learned and talk about what she does on her projects, she has a very specific way of doing things and excels at it. 

For the humorous things happening at ESa this week I'll have to tell you a little story.

Harry Potter Wand

On Friday Lauren and I were finishing up some finish boards and Harold (office mail delivery specialist) came to drop off some samples and boxes that had arrived. Harold does this every day, at least twice a day if not four times a day. We also get the packages that are not specifically addressed to anyone so we can send out an e-mail and search for the designer it belongs to. Well, Lauren was going through the packages and we got on that was in a skinny really fancy box and we were both really curious because it was unaddressed and we'd never seen a sample in this kind of a box. To make it fun, Lauren said we should each guess what was in the box. Lauren guessed chocolate and I guessed a wand (side note: I love Harry Potter). Lauren opened it up and to our DISBELIEF it was in fact a wand! I was in shock because it was a guess and I wasn't trying to pull a prank on anyone. We were both dying laughing and also seriously confused. Lauren continued to open the box and it said Ron Weasley's wand. We were laughing so hard, Leslie came to see what was so funny. She laughed and said it must be a gift someone ordered for their child in the office. I'll never forget the day we got a wand in the mail!