A Fresh Start at the Blue Ivy Villa Project
Welcome to the Blue Ivy Villa, a stunning oasis in Austin, Texas. With its spacious layout and calming color palette, the home blends traditional elements with modern conveniences to create the ultimate family retreat.
The detail in this home is incredible. Designer Andrea Giles, owner of Andrea Leigh Interiors, took meticulous care to create an intuitive flow from room to room. Our Austin organizers worked to curate items and functional decor that complemented the villa’s striking design, adding to its bright and airy feel.
A Fresh Start
Our clients wanted a streamlined, stress-free moving experience, which made them the perfect candidates for our Fresh Start concierge package, which includes:
A client consultation with our organizing firm to review their home goals, habits, and preferences
An audit of current essentials to identify gaps and create a comprehensive shop list room by room
All items curated, ordered, received, and unpacked by our team off-site
Delivery and installation of all items using our signature organization process
We aimed to make our clients feel at home the minute they walked through that front door. It can take six months to a year to truly feel unpacked and settled in your new home. The Fresh Start experience takes the work off your shoulders and into the hands of our experienced home organizers, who can complete it in just a few weeks!
“The Fresh Start experience takes the work off your shoulders and into the hands of our experienced organizers, who can complete it in just a few weeks!”
We love doing Fresh Start projects because the results are truly life-changing. Moving can be stressful, but it doesn't have to be. Stepping into your new space without a running to-do list in your head, knowing whatever you need is already there without the extra trip to the store—is priceless.
Today on the blog, we’re taking an in-depth look at what happens during a Fresh Start project, exploring its many benefits through a tour of three main rooms in the Blue Ivy Villa: the kitchen, the pantry, and the laundry room. Let’s get started!
PRO TIP: Planning to move soon? Avoid the continued reorganization of your new spaces buy ensuring you have everything you will need for the full year with you move in. Keep a running list of everything you need to stock your home and cut down on trips to the grocery store or Target during the first few weeks in your new home. The checklist we use for clients has thousands of household staples and everyday essentials so we can anticipate gaps and plan ahead for move-in day.
The Fresh Start Process
Before we get into our tour, let's take a minute to review our Fresh Start process. When organizing a space, it's really important to have all the items you need in front of you. If you continue to add throughout the year with Target runs or small orders, not only are you missing the items you need when you need them and adding stress to your life, but you'll find yourself constantly reorganizing and also spending more money in the long run.
We created the Fresh Start package to hit a bunch of different home needs at once. Our team ensures you're fully moved in with everything you need to complete your activities and routines. The organization is 100% sustainable because there's a home for everything, anticipating your future needs and removing all the stress that comes with trickling in new stuff throughout the year and not knowing where to put it.
There are two stages to a Fresh Start project—prep work and onsite organization.
The Prep Work
A lot of the work for our Fresh Start clients happens off-site. The first step? A Fresh Start consult with our Fresh Starts team.
Devon, our Fresh Start specialist, begins by meeting with the client to determine what gaps need to be filled. Using a comprehensive list of thousands of household items, she goes room by room with the client to assess which items need to purchased. This can be anything from utensils to lipgloss. We learn about your dietary restrictions in the family, environmental concerns, brand preferences, etc. From there, Devon and her Fresh Starts team take care of all the heavy lifting. Sourcing, ordering, unboxing, returning, and delivering on-site.
Our goal is to arrive at the home with everything sorted and ready to be placed in the correct zone. This cuts down on confusion during our time onsite and keeps our timelines smooth for clients. To create a well-organized space stocked with everything our clients need, we consult our comprehensive checklist of hundreds of new home essentials. After reviewing, sorting, and editing our client's current belongings against their personal style, goals, and needs for the new home, we get to work sourcing any replacements required and additional items. Our organizing team sources, orders, receives and unpacks everything we bring into our clients' homes. This process can get pretty intense on our end, with the result looking something like this:
Onsite Organization
When the big day finally arrives, we bring everything to the home. Items have been sorted ahead of time by room to simplify things for our team. We then organize every room zone by zone to create systems that blend in with the interior design and work with our client's family routines. We bring alternates of functional decor items, trying them out in the space to find the perfect fit. Once everything has been organized in the home, we go over the spaces with our clients and any household staff so they know exactly what's needed to maintain it. Any unused items are collected and returned by our staff, leaving our clients with nothing to do but enjoy their new space—no last-minute shopping trips required!
Your home is an investment in your family’s health and happiness. It’s our goal to help you do it once and do it well with sustainable systems that will serve your family for years. Fresh Start clients can expect the same standards and approach we bring to our Signature Home Organizing projects:
CONNECTION: Details matter to our clients. We maintain relationships with trusted and emerging luxury brands to give our clients access to amazing products and opportunities.
EXPERTISE: Our organizers are the best at their work, taking ongoing monthly education. We have a dedicated team member responsible for keeping up with top trends in home organization and home management.
CONSISTENCY: Clients can expect the same level of service and detail in their project as they see in our marketing because of how we structure our teams. Every Graceful Spaces organizer is a full-time employee trained in our methods.
SUSTAINABILITY: We don't just make spaces beautiful; we make them functional. Our systems are thoughtfully designed to empower every family member to keep things tidy and adapt to their changing needs.
Benefit #1: A Streamlined Look and Feel
Our work is collaborative, which is why our experts work with your trade teams, interior designers, and builders to create organizational solutions that complement, not compete with, the rest of your home. During the prep work phase of Fresh Start, we consult with our clients to understand their routines, styles, and preferences to ensure that everything we bring into the home feels like it belongs there. Sometimes, this means replacing items or pairing down specific categories to fit a space. Other times, it's about searching for the perfect pieces of functional decor to tie a room together.
When building a home, we invest so much in choosing the right cabinets, countertops, and home decor. But beautiful finishes only matter if we can find our way around the jumbled personal items inside them. Fresh Start is that opportunity to streamline and create a tidiness that mirrors the investment you've made in your space.
Zone planning goes beyond putting things away to really understanding how a family uses the space and what their most frequent activities are. We get super detailed, even considering whether clients are right or left-handed, to make every zone feel intuitive. The result? A space that works as well as it looks.
Fresh Start in Action: The Blue Ivy Kitchen
JUST THE ESSENTIALS
The Blue Ivy Villa has a closed-off kitchen, allowing our clients to relax in the living room when hosting and not have to look at any mess. The walk-through pantry offered plenty of storage and prep space, so we stuck with essential cooking items in the kitchen, placing them near the stove and oven to cut down on time running around.
BEAUTY AND FUNCTION
The kitchen is spacious and bright, so we incorporated functional decor like cookbook stands, cutting boards, and soap dispensers throughout to add pops of personality to the counters without disrupting the calming feel of the space.
STREAMLINED SPICES
We love finding brands that fit our clients' elevated aesthetic while adding convenience. We added a spice drawer stocked with spices from Spice House to keep with the sleek look of the kitchen. A subscription service, Spice House makes it easy to reorder spices on autopilot or an as-needed basis.
PRO TIP: Functional decor is a great way to keep heavy-use ingredients or items front and center without feeling cluttered. When choosing the decor, you may want your organizer or designer to purchase a few options so you can see which works best with the rest of the room.
Benefit #2: Everyday Items At Your Fingertips
Using the Fresh Start concierge service comes in handy everywhere, especially high-traffic spaces like the kitchen and pantry. Our team—including Devon, our dedicated Fresh Start specialist—has this process down to a science. We take a big-picture approach to stocking your space, anticipating your needs now and in the future.
Our Fresh Start clients are often surprised at the sheer number of items we need to bring into the space, but every single one has been blown away at how perfect everything feels once we’ve put each essential in place!
Fresh Start in Action: The Blue Ivy Pantry
ZONE BY ZONE
While the pantry had plenty of counter space, it was important to be intentional in our zone planning. We created a separate baking zone and a produce drawer, keeping any ingredients and supplies grouped near their corresponding zone to prevent confusion.
VERTICAL SPACE
It was important to us that we maximized space in the pantry while still keeping with the airy feel of the design. We used our tried-and-true canisters from the Neat Method, acrylic can risers, and pan organizers to maintain order and space.
PRO TIP: Invest in a streamlined food storage system to maximize space
There’s a reason you keep seeing Caraway promoted online. It’s because their products are AMAZING. Their food storage sets care non-toxic, microwave AND oven safe, dishwasher safe, and the best part? They come with the organizers allowing you to keep your cabinet or drawer tidy.
LABEL LANGUAGES
Our clients requested labels in both English and Spanish. We cut labels onsite using our Cricut, taking care to ensure we had the exact translation for each item. A slim profile ensured the labels never felt crowded.
PRO TIP: We love the built-in details throughout this pantry. To create custom built-ins, combine Fresh Start with our Building Luxury package for an end-to-end experience. Our team can spot opportunities to develop sustainable solutions to serve your family as they grow. We will consult with your contractors, provide any necessary digital schematics, and assist with quality control.
Benefit #3: A Low-Maintenance Backstock
One of the best benefits of our Fresh Start package is that we can condense a year's worth of purchases and decisions into just one to two weeks. Giving everything a home makes it easy to see where you're running low on items, and pairing organization with a backstock simplifies the process even more.
Having a backstock is one of the easiest ways to simplify home management. We purchase backups of everyday essentials for our clients to minimize store runs, keeping them in easy view so they can quickly take stock of any necessary reorders.
Fresh Start in Action: The Blue Ivy Laundry Room
The laundry room continues to be one of our favorite spaces in the home. Why? Because with the right organizational product and a plan in place, the opportunities are endless. In the Blue Ivy Villa, the laundry room serves several different purposes.
Daily laundry and household cleaning storage
Storage for household items
First aid and medication
CLEANING CENTRAL
The laundry room is the perfect place to keep cleaning supplies. We used buckets to sort everyday cleaners and rags so clients could grab and go as needed. Clear acrylic containers were perfect for trash bags, sponges, and mop pads.
One of the best benefits of our Fresh Start package is that we can condense a year's worth of purchases and decisions into just one to two weeks.
WRAP IT UP
The laundry room in the Blue Ivy Villa is a true multipurpose space. We chose a corner to be the designated wrapping station, sorting bows, paper, and other supplies into micro-categories to prevent contents from shifting around when drawers opened.
ONE-STOP SHOP
How do you make a space user-friendly for everyone in the household? Keep items labeled and micro-categorized. We used deep see-through bins from The Home Edit to sort toiletries and other essentials into the laundry room upper cabinets, making it easy to quickly spot items when opened.
PRO TIP: Too much backstock can feel cluttered when you keep it with the original items. It also makes it tricky to keep a running list of everything you'll need to replace monthly. Instead, we recommend storing the bulk of your home backstock in one central location. In the Blue Ivy Villa, we chose the laundry room so our clients could make their shopping lists easily.
