Hello 👋
This week's blog is a little different. It’s quite personal - about moving house, about a childhood home I've never quite stopped missing, and (as I make a wishlist for my next home) about lessons learned from past experiences of ‘home’, and from thirty years of thinking about interior sp...
Hello 👋 and happy Fathers' Day to a tiny, but most welcome, minority of my readership.
This week a designer told me about an enquiry that arrived sounding exactly like a brief from an expert. It was only when the conversation moved to the phone that she discovered the client was a complete novice...
Hello 👋
When I was studying for my PG Cert, one of the most transferrable concepts I learned was about the shape of a ten-week term.
In psychological terms, ten weeks is too long. Without deliberate intervention, morale follows a predictable arc: high at the start, eroding through the middle, rec...
Hello to you 👋
…and hello to June 🍓. The year's midpoint, the final month of Q2, and the month in which you find out whether the first half of the year is delivering what you intended it to deliver.
This week's issue is organised around a single idea: making it happen. The actual, operational, of...
Hello 👋
June arrives this week, and with it the theme that will run through the month: systems and processes: the architecture underneath a well-run practice, the part that clients never see and that makes everything they do see possible.
This week's blog goes right to the heart of it. If you hav...
Hello 🤖
Question: What will be left once AI has taken what it can take?
This conversation is happening across every professional field right now, and interior design is not exempt from it. It’s a good question, and it deserves a thoughtful answer.
Some answers deal in denial: AI can't do what we ...
Hello 👋
This week we’re making the distinction between a busy practice and a built one.
Busy is not the problem. Busy can be good: the kind that finds you sought after, in the zone, choosing between good options. The kind that feels like evidence. But there is another kind of busy that is simply ...
Hello 🧮
Numbers can feel like someone else's territory - the domain of accountants and people who were good at maths at school and, like most of the designers I work with, my instinct is to keep a respectful distance.
But this week, I'd like to suggest a different relationship.
Numbers, used loos...
Hello 👋
In Hothouse we are building up to a big June topic - Systems and Processes. Perhaps not the sexiest subject, but one designed to save you from the overwork that comes from a lack of structure.
When every client inquiry is handled slightly differently. When the fee proposal process starts ...
Hello 👋
Bootcamp started this week, and work is under way. The first round of one-to-ones is complete, and what strikes me is how much clarity sits just beneath the surface. We are working through governing values and early-stage business plans: the foundational layer from which everything else f...
Hello 👋
Performance is a word that tends to get borrowed by the wrong conversations - the motivational ones, the ones that mistake intensity for substance. In Hothouse this week, I want to use it in a more precise sense.
There are two kinds of performance that matter to a designer running a serio...
Hello 👋
There is a number that keeps appearing in my work at the moment. Three years.
It is the period that business research consistently identifies as the threshold at which a new business (or a pivoted one) begins to perform. It’s also the horizon at which big change becomes imaginable without...
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