Sugarhouse recently teamed up with BBC Interior Design Master contestant Amy Wilson to help raise the standards of shared student housing in the city. One of our goals is to continue to make our managed properties stand out from the crowd and create proper homes for our tenants that have been thought about and planned with their enjoyment and welfare in mind. We also want to make interior design more central to our building and refurbishment processes. Fresh from last year’s Interior Design Masters (on the BBC, with Alan Carr) we have engaged with Yorkshire based Amy to help us step things up a notch.
The student housing market in the city is booming with over 60,000 students living and studying in Leeds. Whilst there has been a constant stream of new high specification, purpose-built accommodation being built around the city centre, there remains huge demand for traditional shared housing, especially around Hyde Park and Headingley. According to Statista, 52% of UK students who pay for accommodation while studying still live in traditional student properties in their second and third years.
As the cost of higher education and living expenses increases, students now expect a much higher standard of property and for additional services (such as utilities and high speed broadband) to be included.
As Richard, one of our Directors, said; “Students now, quite rightly, want well thought-out properties and eye-catching design, something which the purpose-built accommodation market caters for. But they also want the experience of living in a shared property with their friends. Through working with Amy we have been able to create design templates and mood boards that mean we can match (and hopefully beat) the standards set by the luxury high rise blocks, but in shared houses. They’re bright and fun and we think our tenants will love them.”
Amy, a former student at Leeds University, has first-hand experience of Student Life in Leeds. She has curated a number of mood boards for the agency focusing on fun, colour and tenant wellbeing. These have been given names and themes such as “The Power of Plants”, “Wanderlust” and “The Future of Disco”. Landlords are able to pick the scheme that they like prior to work starting.
Whilst working on the project Amy updated her Instagram followers. She wrote: “It’s been great fun working with Sugarhouse and seeing someone really think about the design elements of student accommodation. It certainly wasn’t like this when I was a student! I’ve tried to create design schemes that will help inspire landlords into action, and help provide students with an ‘instagrammable’ home to be proud of.”
Work has already begun on a number of houses which we hope to be ready for the start of the new academic year which gets underway in the next few weeks.
To see more of Amy Wilson’s work, go to: www.amywilsoninteriors.co.uk
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