Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 1, Episode 10 /May 9, 2024
Why The Designers Group's founder designs every room for all five senses
Blima Ehrentreu, TDG
May 9, 2024 /Design & Practice
Why The Designers Group's founder designs every room for all five senses
Blima Ehrentreu is the founder and CEO of The Designers Group (TDG), an interior design firm with offices in Toronto, New York and Florida that works on senior living, healthcare, hospitality, residential and office projects. She started in an architecture firm to learn how buildings work before co-founding TDG. She is worth hearing because she treats design as an experience people live in, down to how a room smells and whether the sofa fits through the door.
Blima Ehrentreu, Founder & CEO, TDG
In this conversation
Why Blima starts every client call with their mission and vision, then asks how the space will smell, sound and feel.
The pandemic services TDG invented: virtual office backgrounds for remote workers and a low-cost street-scene wallpaper for memory care units.
The sofa that would not fit through the front door, and how that mistake now shapes every project plan.
How urgent care clinics and skilled nursing homes can borrow from hotels and spas.
What online shopping, hybrid work and video calls have changed in the rooms TDG designs.
It's not just what it looks like, it's also what it smells like.
Blima Ehrentreu
Chapters
AI in the studio
How TDG tests existing AI tools in its design process and sees a future in sustainability analysis for clients.
A space for all five senses
Why smell, acoustics and sight lines matter as much as finishes.
Founding TDG through a pandemic
From a partnership offer to three offices, and the services born during COVID.
The sofa that didn't fit
Learning from mistakes, and a team built on talent rather than quotas.
How spaces have changed
Hospitality in healthcare, mail rooms with fridges and gyms in the office.
By the numbers
E-commerce as a share of U.S. retail sales (fourth quarter)
Blima says apartment buildings from 20 years ago were never planned for today's deliveries. In that time online sales grew from about 2% to about 16% of all U.S. retail.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, E-Commerce Retail Sales as a Percent of Total Sales (via FRED) ↗The office, remote work and giving back
Designing for Zoom, keeping a hybrid team close and the TDG Furniture Exchange.
I always say that a mistake is not an issue if we learn from it.
Blima Ehrentreu
Takeaways
Ask how a space should smell and sound, not only how it should look. In senior living and medical spaces a good smell supports wellbeing, and in a restaurant poor acoustics ruin the meal.
Plan delivery and installation as part of the design: measure the door, the elevator and the order of work before choosing large furniture or partitions.
Design for how people live now. Buildings need package rooms with refrigeration for grocery deliveries, and conference rooms need to look good on camera.
20 years ago people were not doing online orders, so the apartment buildings 20 years ago do not have mail rooms for the amount of online orders that people are doing today.
Blima Ehrentreu