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 share our 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 - Startup, Growing Pains, Maturity, Stardom - each with its own challenges, mindset shifts, and growth opportunities.
(👆find my Tiers document under the 'files' tab in Hothouse)
My coaching helps you level up with intention, so you’re not drifting forward, but actively shaping the next phase of your business. Whether you’re laying foundations or refining a thriving practice, Hothouse brings the structure, momentum and community to help you grow. 🌱
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
Our free membership group on Facebook – a thriving peer community for practicing interior designers. I check in regularly with insights, advice, and encouragement. The hub for all my materials and events. Link to join.
💬 One-to-One Consultations
Book a focused session to tackle a specific challenge or explore a new opportunity in depth. Got a business dilemma? Let's chat. Book here.
🚀 Blocks of Consultations
Ideal for long-term support - we can work together towards a goal, or pop me in your corner as you work through your first projects. Includes my 6 for the price of 5 offer – ask me for details.
📦 Business in a Box
For Tier One: A structured, supported 90-day programme to get your design business launched and earning. This brand new course luanches in September. Book here.
📈 Recipe for Success Bootcamp
For Tiers Two - Four: My flagship programme, blending personal 1-2-1 coaching and group support to help you push upwards into the next tier of interior design business success. Let's plan the structured development of your business together. Learn more, and message me if you're interested in joining.
3. 🔎 BLOGPOST 1 - Has Your Mojo Gone Missing? You’re Not Alone, And You Can Get It Back
Last week, I touched on a theme that struck a chord with many of you - the slow fade of enthusiasm that can creep into your business. This week, I’m sharing the full article: a guide to tracking down your lost design mojo, with five powerful strategies to help you reconnect with your spark, rebuild momentum, and fall back in love with your interior design business.
This is more than a pep talk. It’s a practical guide to redesigning the business behind your creativity, with advice on boundaries, business planning, ideal clients, and (spoiler alert) why isolation might be your biggest block.
Mojo loss is one of the most common reasons designers find their way to Bootcamp. If this post resonates with you, it might be time to stop soldiering on and start rebuilding - with structure, support, and a community that really gets it.
4. 🔥 BONUS BLOGPOST – Sparky Takeaways from Last Week’s New Designers’ Meeting
Thursday’s New and Pivoting Designers’ Meeting in Hothouse was electric. The energy, insights, and generosity in the room were something special - so much so that I’ve pulled together a bonus blogpost to capture some of the standout advice shared.
Whether you’re brand new or a few years in, the designers who joined brought a brilliant mix of fresh thinking and lived experience - and the tips they offered are too good not to share.
👉 Read the bonus blogpost here - it’s full of ideas you can take into your business this week.
5. 🧭 Want to Deep Dive Marketing? Save The Date.
One of the most common worries I hear from interior designers is “I don’t know how to show up on social media.”
But that question - on its own - is impossible to answer. It’s like standing in the middle of a foggy field asking, “Which way should I go?”
First, you need to know where you’re headed.
In our upcoming ⚡️ Hothouse Marketing Brainstorming Session ⚡️ on Monday 12th August at 10.30am (UK), we’ll take a step back from the daily grind, and helicopter up to look at the bigger picture:
🔍 What’s your 3–5 year vision?
🗺️ What tier is your business in right now? (Tier One businesses need a very different marketing approach than Tier Four.)
🎯 Where should you focus your limited marketing time and energy - Instagram? LinkedIn? Local networking? PR? Referrals?
You’ll leave this live 90-minute session with a clearer direction and ideas tailor-made to your stage of business.
📆 Save the date. This isn’t about doing more - it’s about doing the right things, in the right way, for your business.
🧠 LONG READ – This Is Not a Drill: GPT‑5 Is Coming
You may have seen the headlines: GPT‑5 - the next generation of AI from OpenAI - is due to launch later this summer.
There’s no official date yet, but the rollout is expected within weeks, and it’s already being described as a major leap forward. This isn’t a small upgrade. It’s a shift in what AI can do - and how it might work with or against businesses like yours.
So what’s changing? And what does it mean for interior designers?
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What’s Coming with GPT‑5? A step towards ‘agentic AI’.
"Agents are AIs which have a degree of autonomy, and impact the real world. They can negotiate a discount from your insurance company, or book you an airline ticket - delivering your preferences for seat location and layover times. They can ask for help from other agents, and collaborate in mixed teams of humans and machines. Eventually, they will run whole companies on their own." Calum Chace - author and keynote speaker (and my ❤️).
While we don’t have the final specs, here’s what’s widely expected based on credible tech sources:
- More autonomy: GPT‑5 will behave more like an intelligent assistant that can take action - not just answer questions. It may use tools (like a browser, calculator, calendar, or even design software) without you instructing it step by step.
- Long memory: It’ll remember previous conversations, details about your projects, and even your tone of voice or preferred formats.
- Multi-modal capability: GPT‑5 may be able to understand and generate not just text, but also voice, images, possibly even video - all in one conversation.
- Smarter decision-making: It’s expected to offer more accurate, confident outputs, with far fewer errors or hallucinations than current models.
In short: we’re moving from “helpful assistant” to skilled digital co-worker.
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The Competitive Threat to Designers
This is where things get real (not immediately!) in the not too distant future.
It’s not hard to imagine AI systems teaming up into agentic networks (clusters of tools and models working together), capable of offering basic but tailored design advice - almost instantly, and at almost zero cost. These systems could handle layout suggestions, colour palettes, lighting choices, furniture sourcing, and more, at a level that’s good enough for some clients.
Equally, large businesses may adopt AI-powered systems to automate parts of interior design, especially in property development, rental styling, or retail environments where personalisation is secondary to speed. Why wouldn’t Ikea or John Lewis offer customers fully-resolved and bespoke design solutions, and fulfil procurement with proprietary product? Or new apps offer full interior design solutions for free, monetising affiliate links?
This could be good for us - there could be new business models to jump into, and it should massively expand the market and drive demand for interior design services from clients who hadn't considered it before.
But, it’s critical not to stand still.
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Here’s What You Should Be Doing Now
If you’re reading this as a working interior designer - particularly a sole trader or small studio - this moment is not about fear. It’s about focus. Here’s how to get ahead:
1. Use AI now to work faster and better.
Integrate it into your business - not just for writing posts or emails, but for idea generation, project planning, documentation, research, and admin. Use it to increase productivity, improve consistency, and enhance the quality of your work.
If you don’t adopt it, you risk falling behind competitors who do.
2. Sharpen what makes you different.
The more basic tasks AI can perform, the more valuable your distinctiveness becomes. What’s your unique aesthetic, your process, your story, your philosophy? You need to make these things visible and easy to understand.
3. Put a human face to your brand.
Whether that’s through video, photography, writing, or live interactions - your future clients need to feel you’re a real person with taste, insight, and emotional intelligence. These are things no machine can fake convincingly (yet).
4. Move upmarket.
It's likely that high net worth clients will still choose IRL designers over digital for a while. So move your business upwards now, with intention. See blogs I've written on elevating your business (here) and (here), and watch the recent series on selling to HNWI on YouTube.
5. Centre your human understanding, build future-proofed skills.
Clients often want more than beautiful rooms - they want reassurance, clarity, vision, empathy. These human qualities are your superpowers. Make them central to your service and your message.
And, for now, AI can't oversee building renovations or attend site meetings, so look for opportunities to develop your skillset in the holdout areas.
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I’ve created a free set of induction materials to help designers get started using AI in their business - based on the current version of ChatGPT and other generative tools. You can find them here. Even as GPT‑5 comes online, the core principles remain valuable: learn to work with AI so you can stay ahead of it. And I'll be running a session on AI for interior designers for the BIID in the autumn.
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The Takeaway?
The next wave of AI won’t wait for the design world to catch up.
But you don’t need to fear it — as long as you adapt with intention.
This is not a drill. It’s the start of a new design era.
And if you’re in Hothouse, you’re not facing it alone. We can and will talk about it!
📅 What’s Coming Up in Hothouse
🔹 Marketing Brainstorming Live – Monday 12 August @ 10.30am UK
🔹 Bootcampers’ Board Meeting – cohort of 2024 – Friday 25 July @ 9.15am UK
🔹 Bootcampers’ Board Meeting – cohort of 2025 – Monday 4 August @ 1.00pm UK
All links will be inside the group under the Events tab! Bootcampers Board Meeting by invitation only.
🧳 My Week in Hothouse
My own summer programme of work is underway, building new products and courses for the autumn. And of course, continuing the marketing drive.
I returned to LinkedIn this week, but still have work to do on Instagram...some family health issues have taken priority
The highlight of my week was the New Designers meeting on Thursday - fantastic to meet like-minded designers and chat through common issues.
💡 Final Thought – What If the Beginners Are the Boldest?
We often assume that experience gives us the edge.
But seasoned designers can sometimes get stuck in old thinking, comfort zones, and well-worn scripts.
Meanwhile, beginners are asking big questions.
They’re hungry. They’re paying attention. They’re learning fast.
What if that mindset - open, curious, unafraid to get things wrong - is the real secret weapon?
So wherever you are in your business, ask yourself:
Am I still approaching it like a learner?
Because in a fast-changing world, beginners may be the ones who see things clearest.
With best wishes for the coming week!
Julia
Founder - Hothouse
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