Tag: DesignsbyDen

Let’s Eat Kanin

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Another long overdue post! A few months ago, the owners of Huggle Hub Food and Drinks contacted me again to consult with an interior renovation of their restaurant. They did a re-branding of their restaurant and I happily obliged.

The final design.

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The existing space looked like a dental clinic due to the pure white interiors. It was supposed to have varnished wood accents, but the contractor just painted those over SIGH. Since my proposed interior design was only less than 50% accurate, this was the chance to remedy the interior design of the restaurant. However, they had a limited budget for the renovation. I proposed a bunch of options for them to choose from.

Different wood accents and a reuse of the grass tiles.

Adding grass tiles on the ceiling and wood accents for the wall.

One of the ceiling design concepts.

Proposing a new concept doesn’t need to be expensive. A re-paint or additional accents would do the trick to make the interior design pop. This time also, I asked a reliable contractor (from Manila) to do the renovation for this project.

During the occasional Zambales visits, I also got a chance to take promotional food photos for them. ♥ This is also my role in our food blog.

Taco fries. ♥

Shawarma rice. One of their best sellers.

For their Unlimited chicken wings promo.

So, how does their restaurant look like now? BETTER! ♥

My camera phone couldn’t do justice to the way it looks now huhu. It looks SO GOOD.

Repainted the pendant lights. The L.E.K. lights were bought by the client.

Let’s Eat Kanin – Iba, Zambales.

Huggle Hub Food & Drinks

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A blog post that is long overdue is about my interior design freelance project last year. My classmates from High school contacted me late July 2017 to do an interior design proposal for their restaurant project in Zambales.

The first proposal

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As with any interior design project, this didn’t go as smoothly as I wanted. A lot of problems were found on site and with the travel time of 4-5 hours, it was difficult to monitor the construction progress.

The expected final outcome.

Nevertheless, we did the best of the situation The restaurant had their soft opening on September 2017 and grand opening around November 2017. Their food is about comfort/happy food. And not being biased here, their food is delicious!

HS classmates effort.

I was also requested to do the mural outside of the resto. They asked our classmate Kat (leftykatletters on Instagram) to do the lettering. She was also my seatmate back in 4th year! This was actually our first time to do a mural. For first timers, I think we did great! ♥

Please follow Huggle Hub Food & Drinks on Facebook & Instagram !

Huggle – Valentine day decor

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One of my pending blog posts! This is wayyyyy overdue. I was requested to design the Valentine’s Day decor for my restaurant interior design project that I haven’t blogged about yet – Huggle Hub Food & Drinks. This was a labor of love – as everything was DIY!

Hello. ♥

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As to why I haven’t blogged about this restaurant project yet – I’ll tell you soon HAHAHA. The clients asked me to do the visual merchandising for their restaurant & milk tea franchise with a budget of 1k pesos. I suggested that we DIY it all way to save on costs. It took a day to make 2 medium-sized roses. I made 6 pieces! I even asked help from my mom to do the leaves & pompoms.

A mock-up at home. HAHA.

This was also the time that my high school best friend came back to the Philippines to visit. Since all of us were classmates wayyy back, we brought him to Zambales too to relax.

I think we stayed there for about 3-4 days. When we were installing the flowers at the restaurant side, we estimated that I didn’t made enough for the milk tea side. So we bought more cartolina (and a glue gun). The client wanted a bigger rose, so a bigger rose it is! I used up 4 cartolina for the giant rose on the right.

They left me all alone making this rose while they were talking business. HAHA.

Milk tea side. ♥

Making the roses was super challenging! I didn’t have any experience with making paper roses that time. But I took the challenge and watched youtube videos HAHAHA. I loved the results! I want to do this again in the future. But next time, I hope I can do it faster!

Re-learning SketchUp & V-ray

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In interior design, there are numerous ways to present your design to the client. It can either be free hand, 3D renders, or a combination of both. That would require knowledge in numerous programs not taught in college. (I’m not sure if its taught now, but back then we didn’t have this). One of the programs is SketchUp. It is a 3D modeling computer program that is useful for interior design. It has a free version called – SketchUp MAKE, and a paid version called – SketchUp Pro.

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SketchUp is my favorite program in 3D modelling. Here are the reasons why:

  1. It’s free to use. For beginners, the SketchUp MAKE will suffice. The 3D Warehouse 3d models are also free.
  2. I could import my plans from Autocad (in .dwg file) to SketchUp, scale it, and then build up the walls from there. (This is for Pro version)
  3. Getting models is easy. It has its own 3D Warehouse accessible from the program itself. There are also numerous websites that provides free/paid models in .3ds & .skp files.
  4. Customizable. I could use any photo I want and use it as a material in SketchUp. For example, if I don’t want to use the default wood textures in SketchUp, I could import a wood texture that I got online and use that.

With SketchUp, I feel like I’m just playing a game of Sims on my laptop. Here is a sample 3D model that I did:

To make it look realistic with all the lights, shadows, etc. You need to use a Rendering plug-in for that. I use V-ray for SketchUp for this. This is not free, but there’s a trial version so you could try it out & decide if this works for you. There are other rendering plug-ins for SketchUp, but I’m used to V-ray. Here is the sample 3D render in V-ray:

Post-processing in Photoshop.

It’s been a while since I’ve last used SketchUp. The time where I used it extensively was way back in 2012, I started relearning again last December 2016. Added that I’ve bought a new laptop the same time, I finally got the chance to render in V-ray since my laptop can finally render quickly. Back then, a simple render would take 8 hours, now it would take around 1-2 hours.

To learn more about SketchUp, here are some useful links:

To learn more about V-ray for SketchUp, here are some useful links:

I hope I’d improve my SketchUp & Vray skills this year! So I could make tutorials and teach others as well. ♥