If you’ve been following along closely, you’ll know that we’ve been connected with an incredible shelter called Family Promise for a while now. They’re a non-profit organization in Portland doing wonderful work for our community, providing housing and support for families experiencing homelessness. They took over an old motel, transformed it into a 70+ household shelter, and have been operating at capacity for at least as long as we’ve been working with them–all while undergoing a major renovation!
It’s quite impressive what they’ve been able to do–completing the work in strategic chunks, tackling wings or floors at a time, so the facility could/can still operate throughout the construction chaos. We signed on to help them with their design/decor needs way back when, but the renovations have made our process a slower one, as function is simply more important than form at the moment. The last thing we want to do is further complicate a renovation with our suggestions when it’s already pretty disruptive on its own. But they’ve made some amazing progress and have a few finished spaces now ready for the EHD touch! For right now, we’re mainly focused on their communal room needs; the playroom, the lobby, some of the offices, etc.
This was the brand new playroom just before they moved in with all the things. Many of the larger renovation design decisions were made by the architecture firm on the project, and while we weighed in where we could, so many choices just had to be made FAST and without our input, to keep the project on track. The new spaces are SO much better than what they had been, but being a large, commercial-grade project, it can be hard to translate the feeling of home without adding in that layer of design/styling after the fact.
But that’s where we come in! The space is brand new, but it’s not without challenges. The new playroom feels like it’s doubled in size from the old one (awesome) with fresh carpet tiles (not our favorite look tbh, a choice we knew we’d have to design around from the jump), a new coat of paint (again, not our color choice but an easy thing to update), some textured ceiling tiles, a very unique layout, and of course all the bells and whistles required to bring this space up to code.
The room has two entrances from the main hallway and another door that connects to the laundry space, with a window between the two areas for parents to keep an eye on their little ones. Two big windows along the back walls let in a decent amount of light and a funky center support wall and beam situation cut through part of the space, creating various zones within the room…and definitely carving out an opportunity for some fun and intentional design!
To me, this beam/wall/walkthrough combination looks like it was destined to be a playhouse. Even the ceiling is given a different treatment that reads something like a roof. It’s one of those funky, unchangeable structural elements that may just end up providing a lot of design direction for the rest of the space. It’s what first had me so excited to dive into this space and get to imagining. But it does create a bit of a division in the room…
So What’s Next?
First and foremost this room needs to function best for the shelter’s needs. As you can see, it’s fully in use at the moment! It has found its current rhythm and systems and our goal now is to work with the flow, not disrupt it, meaning we want to change/update/swap the tired pieces that we can, without rearranging or reconfiguring the room too much.
There’s already a pretty clear play zone, couch/TV zone, teen/storage zone, and a zone for working and reading at tables. The sofa needs to stay underneath the laundry window for various reasons, and the storage cabinets and teen zone (aka foosball table) are best tucked in the back. There is some flexibility with the remaining “zones”. But really they just have a lot of stuff, and have discussed wanting to remove a few things that aren’t seeing as much use–likely the train table in the play zone and a good chunk of the books (just to store somewhere else). To get a better feel for the space as a whole, you can watch the video below (just wait for a couple of ads to play).