We're building a studio! You may have seen on our instagram a couple posts of "studio progress" or you have read our Design Sponge interview where we talk about the growth of our business and how it has affected our home. I wanted to talk a little more here about why we decided to build a studio.
We started Moglea with one letterpress and lots of ideas. We had no idea what type of business it would turn into when we placed Patty (our Chandler and Price hand-fed platen letterpress) in our farmhouse basement in May of '09. The letterpress studio was only supposed to take up half of our basement. Since 2012, we expanded from one press and paper cutter to four presses, a foil stamper, two paper cutters, a padding press, and all of the space that is needed to accommodate employees and product inventory. Moglea now takes up our whole basement and garage. You can see the cluttered space in black and white above that is currently our studio. This is also why you haven't seen many photos of our studio, as it's not a pretty space at the moment. Last spring, we decided that Moglea has reached its limit in our home. It has been crazy balancing a business with employees and raising our children in the same space. We've needed a healthy separation between our life and business, so Chad started designing the new studio in the spring of 2013.
You may be wondering why we don't use an existing space in the town we live in. We love the convenience of keeping our business close to our home, but not in our home. This way I can simply walk to our studio for press checks, instead of drive a few miles.
We have a quite a vision for this space. Our studio will have plenty of space for our equipment, inventory and office space, but will also house a woodshop, bedrooms for interns or family, a kitchen, breakroom and patio for relaxing. When you build something this permanent, you have to plan for how you will use the space for the next few decades of use. We're excited to have plenty of space for Moglea to grow and evolve, space to host letterpress workshops, space for Chad to start designing furniture prototypes, a kitchen for cooking classes, and bedrooms to host employees and friends. You can tell in this paragraph that we have plenty of creative interests that we are trying to accommodate, but since we are two designers that want a comprehensive space to work in for a long time, we wanted to have lots of space and lots of options.
This project has been a huge undertaking and learning experience for my husband, Chad. Chad has lots of experience in construction mainly from farming, but he has never been a building architect and developed a project so closely from start to finish. I'm so so proud of how Chad has taken this building from many sketches to a beautiful reality. We know this space will be a blessing to us, but we hope we can bless our employees but also the design community as well.
The last photo is the final Sketch-Up rendering of the studio. We can barely contain our excitement, as building this has been a dream for us. If you'd like to see progress on the space, be sure to follow us on Instagram. (Meg here or Chad here.) The walls of the studio will finish going up this week.
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