What is Hothouse?
Hothouse is a free professional development group for ambitious interior designers, built around the Hothouse Method:
Design – we plan our businesses
Declare – we set goals and targets in public
Deliver – we measure and watch our businesses grow
Whatever your stage – startup, lightweight, middleweight or heavyweight – Hothouse is here to help you grow with intention, strategy, and momentum.
May Intentions and Focus 💼📈
May is Bootcamp month – and I’m deep in one-to-one sessions with design entrepreneurs. While things are a little quieter in Hothouse this month, we still have standout learning opportunities on the calendar.
Up next:
📸 Simon Maxwell joins us on Wednesday 14 May to talk interiors photography – and how to get better shots, smarter licensing, and higher returns on investment.
Details on the webinar (and how to join) below.
🔍 THIS WEEK IN HOTHOUSE: for one week only - THE AI EDITION
🧠 AI for Interior Designers - Six Smart Uses You'll Wish You'd Tried Sooner
This week’s blog is all about how AI is quietly transforming design businesses from the inside out. From photoshoot prep to website review, interior designers are discovering that AI isn’t a gimmick - it’s an indispensable assistant.
✅ Need help styling a shoot but no budget for a stylist? AI can mock it up.
✅ Tired of chasing minutes and writing reports? Let transcription tools do it for you.
✅ Want a sharper brand voice or faster content creation? There’s a prompt for that.
✅ Curious if your website is working hard enough? AI can review and improve it.
✅ Website reviews and SEO optimisation
✅ Content repurposing (a.k.a. content stacking)
I’ve shared six inventive, high-impact ways to work smarter with AI right now - plus real prompts and tools to get you started.
🔌 The Environmental Cost of AI: Use It, Don’t Waste It 🌍
When I jumped on the ‘action figure’ meme a month or so ago, I had no idea that approx 500ml of water is needed to cool AI systems each time they produce a single image like this.
Image generation is a particularly intensive task for AI, but even simple AI prompts consume approx 500ml of water every 5-50 interactions.
The Economist Babbage Podcast on 9th April - Will AI Help Or Harm The Climate? - presented a thought-provoking and balanced overview of the environmental impact of AI systems.
Listen here (you’ll need a subscription to access this podcast).
And here’s a free short video by the New York Times on the same subject, but without reference to the positive mitigating factors.
Rising Energy Consumption: Data centres, essential for training and operating AI models, currently account for approximately 2% of global electricity usage. Goldman Sachs Research forecasts global power demand from data centres will increase 50% by 2027 and by as much as 165% by the end of the decade (compared with 2023). In most cases nuclear or renewable energy is proposed to power this growth, however there are questions around what happens in the timelag between data centre proliferation and the onlining of new power plants?
Water Usage: Cooling these data centres requires significant water resources, raising concerns about sustainability, especially in water-scarce regions.
Carbon Emissions: The energy-intensive nature of AI contributes to higher carbon emissions, particularly when powered by non-renewable energy sources.
THE GOOD NEWS 🌿 - yes, there is some: despite its environmental footprint, critical reviews of AI also recognise its potential for innovating promising solutions to mitigate climate change:
Optimising Energy Grids: AI can enhance the efficiency of electricity grids, facilitating better integration of renewable energy sources.
Methane Leak Detection: Advanced AI models can identify and address methane leaks more effectively, reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Accelerating Material Discovery: AI accelerates the development of new materials for batteries, potentially leading to more sustainable energy storage solutions.
Many tech giants are taking significant steps to address the challenges above, for example Microsoft has pledged that by 2030 it will be carbon negative, and by 2050 Microsoft will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975.
THE LESSON I TAKE FROM THIS IS: be mindful when using AI. When I need to do a sum I’ll use a calculator, and if I need to check a word, I can fall back on the dictionary. AI is a complex and sophisticated tool and from now on, I’ll stick to using it for work or for advanced, non-frivolous applications.
🌿 AI Is Reshaping Interior Design – Are You Ready? (Tip: Personal Branding is EVERYTHING!)
As AI tools become more capable - more joined-up and embedded in the mainstream - interior design as a profession is quietly being redefined. In this week’s Instagram carousel and LinkedIn post, I explore how agentic AI is likely to shape the future of our industry, and why visibility, personal branding, and strategic positioning are no longer optional extras.
These aren’t just marketing tactics, they’re essential steps in safeguarding the human value of your work, and keeping your business relevant as the competition from AI systems grows. Agentic AI is coming.
AND NOW...THE REST OF THIS WEEK'S NEWS:
📌 Pinterest – Your Secret Weapon for Discovery
In last week’s Hothouse webinar, social media strategist Kat Dooney of Stripe Social shared her expert take on Pinterest for Interior Designers, and it was packed with insights.
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Unlike Instagram, Pinterest is not a social platform, it’s a visual search engine, where users come with intent, planning their dream homes and saving ideas for future projects. For interior designers, this means Pinterest is a unique opportunity to reach ideal clients who are already in ‘decision mode.’ Kat described it as a positive, evergreen platform, ideal for long-term visibility.
She stressed that success comes from fresh, keyword-rich content, not from chasing trends. Your photography, blog posts, and how-to tips are perfect pin material, and when optimised correctly, pins can keep driving traffic to your website for months or even years.
If Instagram is about engagement, Pinterest is about discovery, and together, they’re a powerful team, with Pinterest introducing prospective clients, and Instagram nurturing them.
🎥Find the full webinar replay here now.
📸 TOMORROW – Interiors Photography Webinar with Simon Maxwell
WEBINAR:
Wednesday 14 May at 10am (UK)
Everything you wish you’d known before your first shoot.
Simon will cover:
📸 Shoot planning & collaboration
📸 Sharing costs & negotiating with others
📸 Licensing pitfalls
📸 B-roll etiquette
📸 Getting published
📸 What you really get at each price point
Free for all Hothouse members – go to the Events tab in the Facebook group, click the webinar listing, then click the link to join.
🌱 My Week in Hothouse
Bootcamp is in full flow, and while growth in my own business is slower this month, I’m keeping the engine running: newsletters, blogs, social, and breakthroughs for our Bootcampers – especially around business vision and confidence.
Consistency over intensity. This newsletter is two days late, the first time that's happened, but I'm back on the horse. That’s the Hothouse way.
📆 Key Dates for May
🗓️ 14 May, 10am – Simon Maxwell webinar
🗓️ 19 May, 10am – New Designer Catch-Up
🗓️ 27 May, 9.30–3.00pm – Race Day 3
🗓️ 30 May, 9.15am – Bootcampers’ Board Meeting (invite-only)
🖱️ All joining links in the Hothouse group under Events
🧩 Final Thought
There isn't enough debate about AI.
We need to prepare now for the future that will emerge in the next 1-3 years as agentic AI* arrives. Beyond this, the time frame that top data scientists project to AGI (systems that are as clever, or cleverer than humans) shrinks every year. At the moment there is some 'clumping' around 2040, but many of the heads of big AI labs think much sooner - even this decade.
I should declare a bias - my partner travels the world warning about the challenges ahead, and yet, even as we are faced with so much disruption, outside of Silicon Valley there is so little conversation.
For those of us using AI - wowed by its accelerating improvement - let's start debating with friends, families, and representatives about what we want to happen next.
*Agentic AI - systems that autonomously make decisions, take actions, and adapt to changing environments with limited human supervision.
Until next week, when normal service will resume,
Julia
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