Tamara LaValla

Tamara LaValla describes the experience of designing the first Hygge Coworking space in Charlotte’s Third Ward as “a beautiful creative trustfall.” LaValla, of Batch Craft, is a multidisciplinary artist whose graphic design skills had never been applied to interior (or exterior) design. Still, in 2015, LaValla and the team were able to alter that first Hill Street space to embody Hygge’s visual identity: a black-and-yellow motif with towering text and site-specific, Instagrammable backdrops inside each location.

Camp North End’s Hygge space, announced in 2017, was its third location and comprises 10,000 square feet of ground-floor space. (At the time, it was the largest of the three.) Though she’d already accomplished two other Hygge transformations before stepping inside, she describes the North End site as a “particularly important” project. “We were asking ourselves, ‘Is Camp North End actually going to be a thing?’ We knew there was so much opportunity there, but we had no idea the community it would become and the energy it would have today. So there were those risks: How big do you go? How much do we give this? [Hygge founder] Garrett Tichy was one of the first people out there. And before we started, it was a really rough space. But we made it happen.”

LaValla and her team did end up going big: The familiar black and yellow coloring bisects the exterior of Hygge Camp North End. True to their community focus, Instagram followers gave input on the black accents scattered across the yellow section of the building’s facade.

After the Camp North End location was finished, Tichy opened an even bigger space, at 20,000 square feet, on Jay Street in Charlotte’s West Side. Will LaValla return to Hygge to work on future spaces? “I’m always open,” she says. “I’ve learned to never say never. [Garrett] believes in the community and the power of spaces, just like I do.”

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