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 - my Business Growth Framework™️. Over time, practices move through four distinct tiers – 1. Startup, 2. Growing Pains, 3. Maturity, 4. Stardom – each with 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 business.
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 90-day programme designed to help you launch your new interior design business with clarity, confidence, and strong foundations. Learn 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. A Note from Me
It’s my birthday this week – and birthdays are always a time of reflection. Two years out from 60, I see the potential for a project that could make my sixties my best decade yet.
I have a confession: this project actually started on my last birthday when I gave up alcohol. I did it so I could be more consistent and productive in my business. I wanted to lauch Hothouse on 1 January 2025, and to picture myself as someone who writes a weekly blog and newsletter. I wasn't sure I had it in me - sobriety felt like a necessary step.
That one choice created space, clarity, and rhythm. And it’s convinced me that transformation happens one decision at a time, especially when those decisions are anchored in a bigger vision of who you want to become.
4. This Week’s Blog – The Systems That Power Your Growth
Smooth business operations don’t happen by chance. They’re built on systems and filing structures that remove friction, free up time, and make space for growth.
This week’s blog shows how a simple model filing system – the same one I teach in Business in a Box – becomes the quiet engine that keeps your business running, and sets you up for the long haul.
5. Why Interior Designers Need to Think Like Tech Founders
In Silicon Valley, the founder is everything.
Investors talk about ‘backing the jockey, not the horse’ - meaning they’re betting on the person, not the product. Products pivot, markets shift, but the founder’s vision, mindset, and resilience are what drive the company forward.
Think of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. Whether you admire them or not, their businesses bear their stamp in every decision, every story, every product. The founder is the energy source, the storyteller, the brand. (Of course, that can backfire...)
In interior design, it’s striking how rarely we acknowledge this. Most of us behave as though our work should ‘speak for itself’, we prefer to present moodboards and finished rooms, hoping the portfolio will do all the talking. But here’s the truth: clients don’t just buy design outputs. They buy you. Your confidence, your vision, your ability to lead.
When designers ignore their role as founder, they limit their commercial potential. They reduce themselves to service providers rather than leaders of distinctive businesses. I believe brand leadership will be the defining quality of those who endure in the coming age of digital design services.
Recognising yourself as founder doesn’t mean becoming brash or egotistical. It means stepping into leadership, carrying your values (read this blogpost on Governing Values - the foundation of the Recipe For Success Bootcamp), setting direction, and building a culture. It means owning the fact that your mindset and presence are the greatest assets your business has.
It means auditing your founder strengths and weaknesses, and turning yourself into a project for improvement.
In tech, this is understood instinctively. It's time to embrace this as part of your role as design entrepreneur.
6. The Founder - Personal Presentation
We often talk about mindset in business, but far less about presentation. Yet the two are inseparable. Together they make up the visible and invisible halves of your founder identity.
Part One: The Theory
Founder Presentation isn’t about beauty standards, gender, size, or age. It isn’t about conformity, and it certainly isn’t about hiding behind makeup if that feels inauthentic. It’s about intentionality.
The same way you would curate a room, you can curate yourself. Clothes, grooming, posture, and energy are signals: they show care, self-respect, and authority. Clients notice. They assume that if you’re thoughtful about yourself, you’ll be thoughtful about their project too.
The 'core material' is irrelevant. What matters is what you do with it. Bold colour, minimalist tailoring, natural simplicity - the choice is yours. The point is that you chose.
Founder Presentation, at its best, is not decoration. It’s alignment - the outside reflecting the inside.
Part Two: The Practice
Here’s where the idea comes alive. Imagine treating yourself as a design project:
- The Brief – What do you want your presence to say (and how does this sit alongside and enhance your business’s ‘house style’ if you have one)?
- Site Analysis – Audit your strengths and weaknesses honestly.
- Concept Development – Gather inspiration, build a moodboard.
- Research - e.g. I recently had my ‘colours done’ online by Curate Your Style, and I recommend it, I went for their Gold package, but actually Silver would have covered all I needed.
- Specification – Wardrobe staples, grooming, accessories.
- Procurement – Edit, source, and tailor what you need.
- Implementation – Make the changes part of daily life.
- Styling & Snagging – Refine and polish until it feels effortless.
This isn’t about fixing flaws. It’s a creative exercise in self-curation - aligning your presence with your vision, and doing it with the same tools you use for design.
When mindset and presentation work together, you step into your full founder power. This contributes to your shift from service supplier to brand leader.
7. The Big Push – Business and Body Aligned
This September, Hothouse launches the Big Push - a self-selecting group of designers will each choose one dial-moving goal to close out the year. For some, that means business milestones. But for others, it might mean personal ones.
My own Big Push is two-pronged: on the business side, I’m relaunching Meta ads to grow awareness. On the personal side, I’m giving up sugar - there, I said it! - as part of a planned two-year physical transition into my 60s. Last year I started by giving up alcohol; this year I’m honing further. It’s all part of my interest in embodiment - ensuring my body is a tool that supports, not hinders, my mind.
What about you? What will your Big Push be? Maybe it’s a service launch, a revenue milestone, or marketing breakthrough. Maybe it’s something personal, like presentation, confidence, or wellbeing. Whatever it is, it’s your chance to close the year with intention - and prove to yourself that you can create real movement when you decide to.
This initiative will launch in Hothouse in September - more soon.
8. 🚀 Business in a Box – Launching 15th September
Stop polishing. Start doing.
Business in a Box is a 12-week programme designed to get your interior design business out of your head and into the market – fast.
✨ Don’t wait to feel ready. Start before you’re ready – and grow as you go.
This course includes weekly teaching and coaching on Tuesday mornings, live support, AND a 'white label' design studio (folders, files and ready-made core documentation) to clone and use in your business.
It’s built for:
- 🎓 New graduates who feel paralysed by perfectionism and don’t know where to start.
- 🔄 Career-changers who bring experience from other fields but need the industry tools to hit the ground running.
- 🕰️ Stalled starters who set up months ago but never gained traction, and need structure and accountability to finally move forward.
💷 Price: £795
👉 Secure your place today – doors close 15th September
9. My Week in Hothouse
Like many designers, I find the summer break brings a natural pause. Projects slow a little, inboxes quieten, and there’s space to reset. This year I’ve chosen to lean into that quiet intentionally - giving more time to family and allowing myself to step back before the intensity of September begins. It's taking its toll on my data (above 😰) but it's important to have balance.
And this regathering is critical ahead of a big September: the launch of Business in a Box, the start of the Big Push, and all the momentum that comes with closing out the year strongly 💪. I have faith that my strategy for Q4 will deliver...because it has all year, so far.
For now, I’m reminding myself that not every season is for sprinting. Some are for recharging. And if you use the slower months with intention, they can give you the clarity and energy you’ll need when the pace picks up again. 🌿
10. Final Thought
Founders aren’t born. They’re shaped - by vision, by discipline, by the small daily choices that add up to momentum.
Systems and strategy build your foundation. Presence and presentation shape your influence. And values anchor it all.
The founder’s role is to hold the big picture – to remind the business where it’s going and to show up, every day, as the clearest version of the person you want to become.
Because in the end, the most powerful design project you’ll ever take on… is yourself.
I hope you are enjoying your summer,
Julia
Founder - Hothouse
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