I have ‘the’ tiniest but cutest workbench which I refer to as my floral studio, squeezed into our laundry. It would literally be 1.8m wide and 1m tall (6ft x 3ft). And sometimes, there simply isn’t any room to do the laundry. Shame.
It came about during Covid in 2020. I had commenced study at the South Metropolitan Tertiary and Further Education in Perth in floristry and was keen to start any small jobs. I brainstormed a name for my floral studio and came up with Cerina Floral Atelier for obvious reasons, started an Instagram account @cerinafloralatelier, hired a marketing company to come up with a logo and printed business cards, bouquet cards and stickers.
I needed a space to store and carry out my floral creations. The only somewhat available space was in our laundry as it had a large sink and tap. We had looked around at various different shelving designs, but Peggie provided a range of shelf and accessories to help store items, all whilst looking fabulous. So then hubby G (fortunately an engineer) with Covid time on his hands, retro-fitted the Peggie system in our laundry. Peggie is based upon the old fashion perforated timber system with pegs being poked into the perforations to hang hooks. Only this contemporary version uses solid timber sheets with larger perforations. The new contemporary design is on a maxi scale and allows large pegs to be moved around the board to custom design a create shelving system, hanging hooks, rails and clipboards. The adjustable pegs allow me to alter the layout of the Peggie board to accommodate my growing number of tools and materials. As my studio was permanently on show, I wanted to make sure that it was stylish yet fully functional. As they say form and function.
The G moved cupboards up and across to carefully squeeze in the component pieces, and carefully routed in a strip light under the top shelf so that I could see over the benchtop. The shelves are now full with my floristry books, watering can random dried flowers, old birds nests, pin frogs, my boom box and bric-a-brac which I can’t manage to throw out, and a large bowl of dried native flowers which I may or may not use one day. A clipboard keeps my sketch pad at hand and the hooks hold a large ball of elastic bands, rose strippers, snips and a pen holder for my sharp tools. A rail holds a number of ribbons that I use on a regular basis so they are at hand. The easel holds my sketches in place when I’m designing, and the cup holders keep my pens, knives and snips in place. I hope to one day remove one of the under bench cupboards to slip under a 60’s bar chair which I’ve inherited so that I can sit down whilst making buttonholes and corsages.
I also stripped out some of the laundry cupboards and filled them with a plethora of ugly floristry sundries and tools including chicken wire, ribbons, pins, parafilm, string, rock collections, wrapping paper and tools. Baskets stuffed full of dried and preserved botanical materials sit atop the highest cupboards skimming the ceiling.
I purchased a small fridge, just a regular fridge without a freezer, which I set at between 5.5 and 6.5 degrees celsius (roughly 42 degrees fahrenheit) specifically for flowers (although it has been a quasi champagne fridge during parties!). I have a separate small rectangular thermostat (which you can see in the photograph below) which is fixed to the inside of the door and has a wireless connection to a display receiver which tells me the inside and outside temperature of the fridge which I can adjust according to the season (or the contents). My floristry buckets live directly outside the back door where all my wastewater from the flowers is poured directly onto the garden.
Since 2020, my vase and candleholder collection has expanded and has spilt out into the adjacent hallway cupboard. It won’t be too long, before I will need even more space.
Several months ago, Shop for Shops (@shopforshopsaus), an Australian shop fitting and display solution store, where we purchased the Peggie from, held a competition to highlight the different applications for Peggie. Lo and behold, my ‘tiny’ studio won (1 of 8 winners) a $200 gift voucher and was featured on the Shops for Shops Instagram.
I hope to expand my studio out into our former gym that has recently been converted into my husbands office. It’s a 5m x 5m (16.5ft x 16.5ft) free standing, timber floored airconditioned room. Double doors open out to my vegetable garden and access is directly from the driveway for easy flower bucket access. It has beautiful natural morning light, and a wall to wall to ceiling mirror (used previously to watch bulging muscles) for making bouquets.
My dream is to one day have a large expansive benchtop, country style sink, a wall to wall deep shelf system in which to colour code my vases and candleholders and perfectly labelled bins holding floristry sundries. But for now my ‘tiny’ winning studio will do.
I’d love to see your studio or workshop for inspiration, whether it be a hairdressing salon, artists studio or writing corner.
Thanks Kristi, the other good think about it is that I it forces me to be tidy and more importantly, it occasionally gets me out of doing the laundry because there's no room!
Congrats for making space for your vision!! And the writing gig when Covid slowed you down. I’m looking forward to reading your next chapters about your business.