A design studio is sometimes seen as an example of an almost ideal creative workplace: a rich and dynamic environment that facilitates many different types of collaborative work. In this project, we aimed to recreate the positive features of a design studio in an educational and workplace setting using distance-spanning digital technology. We first set up a series of experimental collaboration systems to facilitate teaching and research at a university during the early days of the Covid pandemic. We quickly found that many concepts proposed in the research literature were not practically feasible. Instead, we constructed realistic solutions using off-the-shelf hardware and software that afforded nosvel and efficient ways of blending co-located and distance collaboration. This included informal interaction settings with one or multiple participants both online and in-person, as well as formal hybrid teacher/student presentations. From this we learned that although much of the required hardware already exists, it is not generally being used to its potential. We also found that the standard meeting software is not fit for this kind of creative collaboration settings. The insights from this will support the creation of better support for combining remote and in-person creative work.