Creating a Place to Create

By Leah A. Zeldes, Brand Publishing Writer

Whether your creative passion is writing, drawing, sewing, crafting or cooking, a designated work area with space to store your tools makes all the difference in acting on your inspiration.

Creative people often have rooms solely dedicated to their work, but for many Floridians, rooms must do double duty. A studio or sewing room may double as a guest room, den or even a dining room. Brenda Clark, a designer for Baer's Furniture, a fine furniture group with 15 locations throughout Florida that's been trsuted by homeowners for nearly 70 years, often suggests repurposing the dining room to clients who need creative work or leisure space. "I've turned them into libraries, sitting rooms, bars, all kinds of things," Clark says.

Since the breakfast room and outdoor seating on the lanai often suffice for those few meals eaten at home, a traditional dining room with table and chairs and sideboard would sit empty most of the time, Clark says, noting that dining room furniture - all those chairs! - can be expensive.

Many people would rather put their resources into making the room into one that fits their lifestyle. "So I come up with creative ways to turn it into functional space," she says.

You might think that making a room play many parts means embracing neutral tones and a noncommittal design scheme, but Clark says experience has taught her that any living space's design must yield to the needs and personality of the person who spends time there. Cory Doctorow, whose books include "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", goes in for rich colors in his creative space. Scattered Persian rugs liven up his painted red, office floor. Along with his computer and working tools, Doctorow's huge office is filled with bookcases and quirky collections of masks and toys.

"Most of the stuff at the office is purely sentimental or storage (authors' copies take up a lot of the room)," he notes, "but I couldn't live without my postal scales and...my Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which I read through an articulated, illuminated circular magnifying lamp."

Tammy Coxen of Tammy's Tastings does use her dining room for eating in, mainly because she caters meals and teaches creative cooking and cocktail classes. Coxen performs creative work all over the house, reading cookbooks for inspiration and menu ideas in the living room, creating dishes and teaching in the kitchen and serving and summing up in the dining room.

Coxen's major concerns include functionality and a need to avoid distractions. "Because I do food as art," she says, "I like to let the food speak for itself." So she avoids design elements that would clash with the food. She even sticks to all-white plates.

Coxen says her biggest issue is storage space. For one of her menus, she says, she needed 13 small appliances to create the meal. In her kitchen, she installed some waist-high shelving to hold her mixer and food processor when not in use, as well as her most consulted cookbooks such as her collection of Nathan Myrvold's multiple-volume "Modernist Cuisine."

For balancing creative needs, storage and living needs, Baer’s designers say to look for multipurpose furniture for keeping tools and materials at hand but tucked out of the way. If you’re repurposing a guest room, try night tables with drawers and platform beds with storage drawers. For more space, you might put a storage cabinet or bookcase in a closet or out in the hallway.

In a dining room, benches with interior storage and tables that fold away can help to make an uncluttered place to work. A wall unit with a desk that folds out and enclosed shelving can create attractive work and storage space.

“There are some really pretty library walls that have a functional ladder,” says Clark. “People love those.”

The challenge with a rearranged dining room is that the area is open to the living room or great room and possibly the kitchen. Creating open flow is important, as well as making it blend with the other rooms, so it doesn't look displaced.

"You want to keep the color flowing," Clark says.

Lighting also helps direct your eyes toward your work and away from distractions. The three main types of lighting are:

- Ambient lighting: general all-over illumination provided by ceiling lights or chandeliers.

- Task lighting: typically brighter and directed toward a specific activity such as reading.

- Accent lighting: which adds drama through under-cabinet lighting or picture lights.

"The key to good lighting is variety," says architect and lighting designer Joe Rey-Barreau, education director for the American LIghting Association.

The best lighting design, he says, involves layering multiple types of illumination. Rather than a single, bright overhead light, you might have several lamps, some wall sconces and some accent lights or recessed lights. “So you have a variety of means to change the lighting for different purposes.”

During daylight hours, Rey-Barreau says, natural lighting forms a key part of the ambient light, and window treatments play an important role. Let sunshine in when you want it, but use light-filtering shades or blinds to control harsh lights and keep the glare off monitor screens. Most often, Rey-Barreau says, “We like light closer to us, to bring the scale down to eye level.” Bright lights directly overhead create uncomfortable shadows, he says. He advises expanding the light to cover different parts of the space, with lamps and shades set so brighter light is directed toward your work.

“You need to have multiple sizes of lamps,” Rey-Barreau says. Baer’s designer Clark reminds that in addition to good lighting, almost any kind of creative work requires a comfortable place to sit. Some folks with different needs find some incredibly creative solutions. Doctorow deals with the sedentary lifestyle that typifies writers by keeping a treadmill under his desk: “I have a desk up on breezeblocks that I can use as a standing desk, or with a cut-down treadmill, or with a tall lab chair.”

A piece of furniture in its own right, a massive Yama cold-brew coffeemaker tower — a steampunk dream in wood and hand-blown glass — provides Doctorow with that essential writer’s tool: caffeine.