A Day in the Life of a Ukio Designer

We’re always talking about our impressive apartments, but we realized that we’ve never gone into detail about what goes into creating these Ukio designs. That’s all about to change.

Let us present to you an insider's scoop of the daily life of a Ukio designer. That’s all the ups, the downs, and the facts laid out for you about the Ukio design process and the ones who are in charge of carrying it out. And what better way to learn than to follow a real live Ukio designer around for a day. That being said, let us now introduce you to Susan.

Interior designer from Berlin: Susan

Susan is one of our talented interior designers who works for Ukio in Berlin. When coming up with designs for the Ukio apartments she is working on, she finds inspiration in the day to day life around us, conversations with other designers and friends, old Ukio designs, Pinterest, and from her own mistakes. To her, a quote that sums up interior design is “an empty room is a story waiting to happen, and you are the author (unknown)”.

What does a typical day look like for Susan?

The day to day life of a Ukio designer changes depending on the project and where they are in the design process at the moment, but here is a normal day for Susan at work.

9:00 - Susan arrives at the Ukio office in Berlin. She grabs a quick tea and heads to her desk where she opens up her computer. There’s always a ton of emails from Ukio, the property manager, the handyman, and the furniture orders that need to be attended to. Communication is key in design, so there’s always messages on Slack from the other designers in regards to their thoughts on design concepts and the design process.

10:00 - Susan has a meeting with one of the lead designers in Berlin at the end of the week to go over the mood board of a new apartment that she is working on. If it gets approved, then she can start buying items off the shopping list to begin putting together the apartment design. But right now, she is just focusing on compiling her thoughts and creating a cohesive design for each room before the presentation.

11:00 - Susan begins mapping out the apartment layout, furniture, and decorations on Sketch Up to give the lead designers an idea of how everything from the moodboard will fit together in the apartment.

12:30 - Lunch time at the office. Susan steps out with some colleagues to buy lunch to bring back. She enjoys eating at the office and socializing with her coworkers when she can; the people are one of the greatest perks of working at Ukio.

13:30 - Back to work. This afternoon, Susan has to go to a different apartment she is working on in Mitte to meet with the handyman and grab a couple of design pieces at the store along the way.

14:00 - Susan arrives at the apartment and sees that the handyman has completed the painting of the apartment and is working on doing some finishing touches with the woodwork and assembling some furniture that arrived that morning. She immediately turns on some music and begins to help assemble the furniture.

16:00 - After a lot of hard work assembling the furniture, she and the handyman go out for a quick chai tea and cigarette to talk and relax a bit before continuing with putting together the apartment.

16:30 - It’s back to work. Susan starts placing the furniture that has arrived at the apartment, following her mockup on Sketch Up.

17:45 - Susan and the property manager go through the shopping list of the apartment to see how many more pieces need to arrive until the whole place is assembled. She is hoping to have everything there by tomorrow in order to match the apartment’s timeline. If they notice that a couple of pieces are still missing, she will need to quickly come up with a backup plan for if they don’t get delivered by the next day.

18:00 - It’s the end of a long day at work. There’s still a lot of things to be done before the apartment is ready for guests, so she’ll pick up where she left off tomorrow.

Some of Susan’s Best Pieces

As she should be, Susan is very proud of all of the apartments that she has designed for Ukio. She goes on to mention that one of her most memorable works was with Conil. This apartment will always hold a special place in her heart because it’s the biggest apartment that Ukio offers in Berlin at the moment, and she did not have lots of time to think and plan the concept. In the end, with the help of her colleagues, it looks amazing.

Canena was another project that Susan worked on where she actually did the wall art on her own. Baya was her very first project to test out if she could be promoted within her team. Zaba was an apartment where Susan got to test new designs and concepts, and the result was amazing with the final product looking super clean and cozy.

If you want to have the opportunity to stay in an apartment that Susan, or one of our other designers, has worked on, then you can find all of them listed on our website here. If you want to become a Ukio designer yourself, we’re always looking for talent, and you can find our open positions here.