1. 🌱 What is Hothouse?
Hothouse is a free professional development group for ambitious interior designers, 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 is for designers who want more than inspiration - it’s for those ready to take action.
At the heart of my work is a theory of interior design business evolution. Over time, practices move through four distinct tiers –
- Tier One: startup;
- Tier Two: growing pains;
- Tier Three: maturity;
- Tier Four: stardom
Each tier has its own challenges, mindset shifts, and growth opportunities.
My coaching is designed to help you level up, to elevate your business with intention, so you’re not simply drifting forward, but actively shaping the next stage of your success.
Wherever you are now - starting out or refining a mature practice - Hothouse brings structure, momentum, and community to help you get to the next level. 🌱
2. 💬 How to Work With Me
Whether you’re just starting out or ready to level up, there are several ways we can work together:
🌱 Hothouse (Free Membership Group)
A private Facebook group for practising interior designers. I check in regularly to offer input and answer business questions alongside our brilliant peer community.
💬 One-to-One Consultations
Book a focused session to tackle a specific challenge or explore a new opportunity in depth. Available via the Coaching page of my website.
📦 Blocks of Consultations
Ideal if you’re working toward a long-term business goal or want consistent support while establishing your studio and working with your first clients. Ask me about my ‘6 for the price of 5’ offer.
🚀 Business in a Box
A structured, supported 12-week programme designed to help you launch your new interior design business with clarity, confidence, and strong foundations. Business in a Box is running right now, the next cohort will launch in September 2026, get in touch to find out more.
📈 Recipe for Success Bootcamp
My flagship business planning course, blending one-to-one coaching with peer group sessions. Designed to help you push up into the next tier of business evolution – with a clear plan, defined targets, and the momentum to grow. Drop me a line if you’d like to join the waitlist.
3. 🏛 This Week’s Blog: The Trust-Centred Studio
This week’s blog explores trust – the invisible structure that holds every creative collaboration together. Without it, even the best design work falters.
Trust came to the fore earlier this year when we looked at Selling To High Net Worth Clients (the videos are here on YouTube) - we saw how critical it is to this relationship. In this week's blog, it's trust that gives our client the confidence to share all about their project.
When a studio builds its entire practice around the principle of trust – when trust becomes its first deliverable - everything else falls more naturally into place: clarity, communication, confidence, and efficiency.
4.🕵️♀️ Elicitation Statements: A Gentle Way to Uncover the Truth
A designer client (thank you, Danielle 🙂) shared this gem in our group recently. It’s a fact-finding tactic used by intelligence officers to encourage people to reveal information they’d normally prefer to keep to themselves.
The principle is simple: while most of us bristle when asked a direct question (e.g. “How much are you planning to invest in your home renovation?”), we can’t bear to let an incorrect statement go uncorrected - we just have to jump in!
So instead of asking outright, you can gently seed an assumption:
“I think your partner mentioned you’ve already had some construction estimates done – so you have a good idea of how much this project is going to cost?”
“Am I right in thinking you’re planning to tackle the work in stages?”
This approach helps bypass natural defensiveness and opens the door to frank, practical conversations about budget and priorities.
Curious about the original source? Here’s the video that inspired this idea.
5.👃 The Sniff Test (Part One)
Next week’s blog will explore Sniff Tests - a set of quick reality checks to help you gauge whether a project is genuinely viable or a mirage.
Here’s the first, shared on Instagram this week:
- Your client describes what you know will be a £300,000+ scheme.
- They bought their house for £650,000.
- The record sale on the street? £700,000.
Now ask yourself:
What is it about this client that persuades me they’ll spend £1 million on a £700,000 house? 🤔
There are exceptions – forever homes, pivotal life stages, windfalls, beloved locations – but these are rare. More often, you’re hearing ideas beyond the budget. Or, naievty about how much things actually cost.
As designers, it’s easy to be swept up in a client’s enthusiasm, expecially when they name-check expensive brands. You find yourself sketching and dreaming alongside them, only to discover later that the numbers never stacked up.
A good designer doesn’t just visualise the dream - they sense when something doesn’t smell quite right.
In next week' blog, we’ll look at more Sniff Tests: subtle, practical ways to distinguish the possible from the politely impossible, and how to handle those conversations with tact and professionalism.
6. 📉 It’s Not Just You…
While official data shows modest economic growth, the Institute of Directors recently reported that business optimism is at its lowest level since it started surveying in 2016 – even lower than during the first COVID lockdown.
So if you’re feeling at a low ebb – it’s not just you.
There’s a rhythm to the entrepreneurial year: a surge of energy in spring, a push through summer, and a collective exhale as we approach the end. By November, most of us are running on fumes. I've spoken to so many tired people recently, I thought it was worth reporting here.
Rest isn’t failure, it’s maintenance. A short (guilt-free!) pause for self-care may be exactly what your business needs.
If you need some quiet, to step outside, or to create for pleasure rather than purpose – do it. Protect your energy. Then return refreshed, ready to apply that steady, quiet discipline that real progress demands 🌿.
7. 🌸 My Week in Hothouse
Oh my goodness - it's the 2nd of November!
This week I did my planning for 2026. It feels great to have done it - given where I started from, I am so pleased with the maturity of next year's offerings.
When Hothouse launched in January, I didn’t have a master plan. I did it to force myself into action, because I couldn’t bear to wave my flag and have nothing to offer.
At the time, Bootcamp was my only product, and I struggled to explain what made me different. So I stopped waiting for clarity to strike, and just kept moving, testing ideas, saying yes to opportunities, learning in public. Most things worked, some things didn't. I was forgiven. Thank you.
Somewhere along the way, quite recently actually, confusion has turned into clarity: the structure of my business revealed itself through doing, not planning.
Now, as 2025 draws to a close, I can see how that steady action has built something coherent, exciting, and scalable. I’ll be sharing the full 2026 plan soon - I have to build a new website page first 🤪, I hope you’ll like where it’s heading...but here's a spoiler: Hothouse will carry on for 2026, it's going to be bigger and better, and it will remain free of charge 🤗.
8. 💭 Final Thought
Some days you move the mountain. Other days, you just move a stone. Both matter.
I’ve always loved the idea that you don’t have to bring everything every day - but you do have to bring something. That steady, quiet consistency is a true superpower.
Momentum in business isn’t built by grand gestures, it’s built by ordinary persistence: showing up, sending the email, tidying the spreadsheet, sketching the idea, following up with the client. These are the small, almost invisible actions that compound into mastery over time.
As Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
So this week, don’t chase perfection - just protect your streak. Bring something, however small. It’s that rhythm of steady application that will carry you further than any single burst of inspiration. 🌿
9. 📬 A Favour
Each week I send this newsletter off into the void - and honestly, I have no idea if it’s landing.
Once you’ve read this issue, could you hit reply and tell me:
👉 What in today’s edition did you find most useful or interesting?
👉 What didn’t quite resonate?
👉 What would you like to read about?
Your feedback shapes future editions and helps me serve you better. Thank you! 💛
With very best wishes
Julia
Founder - Hothouse
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