1. Welcome
Welcome to my weekly newsletter. First and foremost, I write this to support a growing network of professional - and ambitious! - interior designers. Each edition gathers ideas, insights and practical tools drawn from the week’s conversations inside my coaching practice and my various courses.
This newsletter is also part of the personal commitment I made to my business for 2025: to show up consistently, week in, week out. I believe consistency is one of the most underrated drivers of long-term success.
2. What is Hothouse?
Hothouse is a free professional development group (hosted on Facebook), built around the Hothouse Method of Business Growth: Design – Declare – Deliver.
✨ Design – we plan our businesses with care and creativity
✨ Declare – we set bold goals and targets in public
✨ Deliver – we track progress and celebrate results
Hothouse isn’t just about being a great designer. It focuses equally on being a grounded entrepreneur and a founder with an attractive, confident presence. It’s designed for interior designers who are ready to take action.
You’ll find links to useful documents, monthly webinars and events, free short courses, peer conversation, and a supportive community that understands exactly what it takes to grow a design business.
At the heart of my work is a theory of interior design business evolution. Over time, studios move through four key tiers:
Tier One – Startup
Tier Two – Growing Pains
Tier Three – Maturity
Tier Four – Stardom
Each tier has distinct challenges and unique opportunities. Wherever you are on this journey, Hothouse brings structure, momentum and community to help you rise to the next level. 🌱
3. This Week’s Blog • A Fresh Way of Seeing Colour 🎨
This week’s blog is a wee bit nerdy (and - I hope! - deeply satisfying). It introduces a different way of thinking about colour, one that goes far beyond the traditional 2D colour wheel. If you’ve ever wished you had a more intuitive grasp of colour relationships, if you'd like to take a more authoritative tone with clients, or have more confidence selecting palettes across multiple rooms, this framework will help you see differently.
It links to my short Colour Masterclass - on special offer at £29 - which develops your understanding of how we see colour into a sophisticated framework for working with colour.
4. Farnsworth–Munsell Hue Test • How Accurately Do You See Colour? 👁️
Fancy finding out?
The Farnsworth–Munsell Hue Test is a professional colour-vision test used by designers, artists and colour specialists to measure colour acuity: your ability to recognise subtle differences between very similar hues.
You’ll be asked to arrange a sequence of coloured tiles into perfect hue order. Your score reveals both your accuracy and your consistency.
A interesting insight for any designer - take the test here.
5. Save the Date • Your January Call to Action
✨ The Hothouse 2026 Planning Challenge ✨
Monday 12 – Friday 16 January | 11am – 12pm (UK time)
Live online. Free.
This is your invitation to start 2026 with clarity, confidence and intention.
Over five focused sessions, we’ll map out goals, targets and growth plans that reflect the unique shape of your business. This is a call to action in the truest Hothouse sense: strategic, staged, and utterly achievable.
If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that consistent, intentional action works. The Planning Challenge will give you the structure to take that momentum into the year ahead.
More coming soon. Put it in your diary now.
6. Last Week in Hothouse • Collaborating with a Kitchen Designer 🍽️
Last week we invited kitchen designer Danielle Kudmany of Liate Design into Hothouse to chat to us about the benefits of adding a specialist, independent kitchen designer to your core team.
Danielle shared how she works with interior designers either as a partner (you work as agent) or behind the scenes (you work as principal).
Probably best that Danielle explains: watch again here.
7. Your AI Strategy for 2026 • Time to Look Ahead 🤖
As part of planning for 2026, I want to invite you to look directly at your relationship with AI.
We’ve reached the tipping point. Designers who lean in work faster, think more clearly and deliver more consistent client experiences. Those who avoid AI will begin to feel the drag: slower proposals, slower sourcing, slower planning.
January’s Planning Challenge will include a dedicated session on:
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how you’ll use AI in 2026
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how you’ll protect your clients
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how you’ll reinforce the human experience only you can offer
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what changes (if any) you may need in your terms and conditions
If you need a gentle introduction on working with AI, here’s a link to my free course for beginners (still relevant, even one year on).
8. A Favour 🌸
If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider forwarding it to other interior designers who might benefit from it - you'll be helping another small business to grow. If you receive this by email, you'll find a link to 'view in browser' at the very top, click on this and use the 'share' button to distribute. Thank you.
9. 🌱 My Week in Hothouse
(Apologies - I usually post my stats here. I have tried three times, I'm sitting in the dark in a powercut, tethered to the internet by my phone's hotspot, and the data image just won't load! - normal service will be resumed last week, promise. Most stats up, or flat...except Meta Ads ❌...I'm off to take a long, hard look at myself).
Last week (and in the coming week) in Business in a Box, and in Bootcampers' Board Meetings, we've been thinking forward to 2026. Evaluating our businesses (and our performance within them), identifying strengths and weaknesses (I wrote a blog on how to do this) ready to make a bespoke plan for business growth in the new year.
So that's where you find me: putting my business through the same exercises, and asking myself frightening questions like: if failing were encouraged next year, what bold, audacious goal would I set for 2026 purely for the lessons and resilience it would teach me?
How about you?
10. How to Work With Me in 2026
There are several ways I can support you next year:
Business in a Box
Does what it says on the box: for Tier One founders who want a clear, confident start, and a gentle, supportive push.
Recipe for Success Bootcamp
For designers in Tiers Two and Three who want structure, momentum and practical strategy as they push their business upwards to the next level - don't hesitate, it's filling up now for April 20th start.
Boardroom Bespoke
A premium one-to-one container for any designer (Tiers One to Four) who wants my structured attention throughout 2026.
On my website you’ll also find:
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One-to-One Coaching – ad hoc or six-session blocks
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Self-Directed Courses – Fees & Charging, Lighting, and Colour Masterclasses now live; Time Management and Selling to UHNW Clients coming soon
🌸 Hothouse remains free for 2026, bringing the whole design community together across Facebook, YouTube and these newsletters.
Visit my website to explore what’s right for you.
11. Final Thought 🌟 - On The Power Of Failing In 2026.
As we look toward 2026, I want to offer a gentle provocation: what if we set out to fail next year? Not recklessly, but deliberately. What if we chose one goal so bold, so oversized, so wonderfully out of reach that its very impossibility freed us from perfectionism, fear and hesitation?
Because failure, in its truest sense, is not the opposite of success. It is one of its most efficient teachers. Journalist Katty Kay is right: failing and surviving is one of the fastest ways to build confidence. You learn you can take a risk, absorb the wobble, steady yourself and keep going. And each time you do that, you grow.
So here is the invitation: choose your beautiful failure for 2026. A target you fully expect to miss, but that will stretch your courage, sharpen your skills and expand your sense of possibility simply by attempting it.
Let it be playful, liberating, audacious. Let it remind you that the point is not perfection. The point is becoming the version of yourself who tries.
Have a super December,
Julia
Founder - Hothouse
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