Right now, we’re featuring Ellie Snow as our Designer of the Month – that means April is all about Ellie (and all of her designs are on sale!)! We’ve been sharing some of Ellie’s design inspiration, a day in her life, and today, we’re giving you a peek inside her studio — both her former studio and her brand new, under-construction studio in the DIY District of Durham. We’ll let Ellie take it from here!

For the past couple years, the Hello Tenfold studio was in an old, rehabbed textile warehouse turned into artist studios (and before that, at my dining room table!). But this year, when a small space in a busier part of Durham, North Carolina became available, a photographer friend and I jumped on it. Just last month we moved in and are slowly getting settled. The location of the space is perfect — a short distance from my house, and across the street from a dangerously good coffee shop and many great restaurants. It’s a part of town lovingly called the “DIY district,” named for the many start-ups in the area.

Above: Ellie’s former studio 

Above is a photo of the new space, which used to be a garage, before it was fixed up for us earlier this year. Our landlords removed the garage doors and replaced them with storefront windows, painted, and cleaned up a bit, but we’ve also had to get creative with ways to hide (or learn to love!) the flaws in an older building. I hired a carpenter to make some inexpensive built-in display shelves in what used to be a doorway, and we’ll cover the rough concrete floors with a variety of rugs.

Although it’s a small space, we felt strongly about having a couch to make things cozy and comfortable, and a meeting table, so we’ve also had to be careful with how much stuff we brought into the space — for me, that meant filling my basement at home with miscellaneous envelopes, paper, and old invitation samples! It felt great to pare down to the essentials, and sharing a space means I need to be a little neater (I can really make a mess, yikes). I’ve been stocking up on attractive looking storage baskets and boxes, and covered my glass front cabinets with patterned tissue paper and re-purposed table runners to hide the not always organized samples, ribbons, and envelopes inside. We have lots of touch-up painting to do. We’re shooting for early May to have a studio opening party, so there will be more peeks coming over the next month! You can see more images and current projects on my blog, Mint.

Many thanks to Ellie for letting us peek inside her new space! We’ll be back with an update when the studio is complete – stay tuned! And be sure to shop Ellie’s designs – you can save 10% on any order (or 20% if you order 6 printed pieces or more!). Start shopping now.