To Plan, Your Dream Home With Us Use This Downtime

These are bizarre times. The impact of the Coronavirus pandemic is being felt at all levels of society and across all different industries, including design as well. The primary concern is for public health, and for in detailed information about precautions to take. However, we are committed to following the effect of the pandemic and its economic fallout on the design trade.

Normal Meetings Converted Into Remote Meetings

For us, not much has changed since we’ve been told to maintain social distancing. So much of what we do is digital and we can do 90% of the work from our computers. All our teams are meeting virtually via different platforms and interacting with clients by sharing photos and PowerPoint presentations.

We are also calling suppliers so they can share their knowledge. For many years, presentations for clients have been done via PDF files, not with poster board festooned with fabric swatches and paint samples. As for the groundwork of measuring and assessing a space, a lot can be garnered from floor plans and photographs.

When we used to have clients from abroad, we build our relationship and trust with the client by way of facetime, messaging, texting, email and telephone, the same way we are working in this situation.

How Customers Are Helping Us In This Current Covid-19 Outbreak

In the absence of an in-person walk-through, we ask prospective clients to document space. They may not know how to measure precisely, so we teach them, step by step. We simply tell them to walk around with their cell phone cameras and then we tell them what exactly they have to photograph.

It actually takes the willingness of the client willing to do so, however, although it’s very challenging to design a space without ever practically being there once, it can really be done. It has become quite significant for us to ask endless questions like do you have dogs? Are there adults with physical limitations? Teenagers, who need space? Etc. So we have been considering using 3D renders and virtual reality, or live streams to show products and interiors so we don’t have to travel for presentations in this Covid-19 outbreak.

Planning Home-Space Virtually

Now is a great time to rethink about the dining room that you rarely use and turn it into your home office, yoga studio, game room, or whatever really works for you. With everyone forced to work at home due to the ongoing crisis, if there ever was a time to think about what home really means, the time is now. Nowadays, we have several tools to communicate that there’s always this expectation that things need to proceed as normal, however, it does feel different.

We have had big projects where we never met with the client, where we shipped samples in the mail, where even the big reveal was done on facetime. One of the major advantages of this profession is that we can help people even from afar. Thank goodness for technology that allows us to continue working and being competent.