Siham Fannoun Baladi, owner of Silver & Beyond, talks with interior design students Thursday morning in her store on 333 Albert Ave. The students are helping redesign the space by giving suggestions for a new layout, color scheme and display for the expanding jewelry store.
Siham Baladi has big plans for her jewelry store.
With space opening next door to her store, Baladi, owner of Silver and Beyond, 333 Albert Ave., wants to add more products and create a more open space for customers to browse through her collection of jewelry and handbags.
But big plans can cost big dollars, Baladi said. To avoid spending big cash on the remodeling plan, Baladi set her sights on MSU, recruiting a group of interior design students to submit design proposals.
“I’m not going to hire a big firm and spend tons of money when I can use the young minds of our next-door neighbors,” Baladi said. “The students are part of the community. Michigan State and East Lansing, to me, are one place.”
For Rachel Silverberg, the possibility of having a local business design its interior with her input is exciting.
“When we found out we get to redesign a jewelry store in East Lansing, we got to be a part of the community,” the interior design junior said. “She’s actually going to use some of our ideas.”
The project is expected to take between 20 and 40 hours of design time.
Many designers charge more than of $100 an hour, so the students are saving Baladi money, said Donna Schmidt, an interior design professor who teaches Interior Design Synthesis II.
The students are gaining valuable real world experience, Schmidt said. Forty students working in groups of two will turn in one proposal each.
“When we can do an actual project like this, when it’s not something I make up in my head, but it’s a real client … It’s that much more valuable,” Schmidt said.
“They’re in there now asking her questions and getting her ideas and finding out what she wants, and the bottom line in design is that the final product needs to be what the client wants — not what the designer wants.”
Megan Laird, an interior design junior, said she was happy to be out of the classroom and putting her skills to the test.
“It’s definitely more interesting,” Laird said.
“It’s nice to be up and around experiencing things that are more hands-on and getting more of a feel for what we would be doing outside the classroom in real life.”
Laird said she hopes to create a visually appealing store and keeping customers coming back to Silver and Beyond.
“The way the store is designed really helps to bring people into the store,” Schmidt said.
“If a store is designed in a way that someone walks in and gets confused, they don’t know where anything is, they can’t get to what they want to get to, they’re not going to come back.”
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