Hello. Thank you to you and your lovely eyeballs for giving me a precious moment of your time.
It makes me smile a lot and I shall tell you why. Because this Homeshaped business of mine has been bubbling away for a while. It has been quietly finding its way and swerving its unruly house mate self-doubt; she who has finally and courteously absconded with no forwarding address.
Now it is here. An actual blog and an actual website for an actual big-hearted business, created for you. And even if you are the only person currently reading this or you are my husband or teenage daughter, it is still here and I am glad.
Me at my ‘creation station’, a little corner of my own to be creative.
It feels so far away from my full-on fifteen years career in advertising, which I chose to leave when little darling no.3 arrived and changed our world. My husband and I took the big decision to knock on the head some double salary loveliness. Not easy with three children a mortgage and a slight lean towards “five star luxury hotel” google searches! But it was worth it. It enabled me to follow my dream of being my own boss. Building a creative, feel good business around my life-long passion for faffing about making houses feel more like home.
So I got my butt qualified in Interior Design. Despite being a champion winger of family life, I didn’t want to wing that one. I wanted some confident theory behind me that I could then share with you. And as I love soaking up new stuff, it was a no brainer.
I studied for the best part of a year with The National Design Academy, spending some of it at the Academy in my home town of Nottingham. It gifted me precious and unforgettable time with my (then ninety) Great Aunt as I stayed with her whilst I studied. (Stick with me, there’s more to this than meets the eye, I promise!)
Auntie J is the Grandma I sadly never got to have and is a little pocket rocket of sunbeams. She is 93, bright as a button and is my no.1 cheerleader. (That self-doubt I mentioned earlier, she would have booted it right out of the door with a perfectly pointy shoe). She is also ridiculously stylish. How many people in their late eighties do you know who renovate a house? And choose metro tiles for their kitchen and Orla Kiely towels for their bathroom?
The great lady herself on her 90th birthday, looking both regal and somewhat scared at my sparklers!
As a child, I used to love visiting her house. It was pulled together, tasteful (in a 1980’s way) ordered and impeccably presented, but always homely. There were pictures of my brother and I everywhere and posh biscuits and cream cakes (collected earlier that day from the local bakery), piled high on tiny round side tables.
Luckily, no photos exist of me at those tables, with those cakes and that 1980’s poodle perm.
A wonder to the eyes of a girl living out in the sticks, in a chaotic family home with her parents working full time and a dog, a cat, a bird, a horse or a chicken around every corner! Our house was definitely not ordered or impeccable, but it was very much in tune with nature! I think my un-done childhood home might well have ignited my love for tinkering with spaces. From a bit of busy family disorder, I would try to create order. My mum would often come home from work to find I had tidied (she worked her socks off and never had the time our the inclination) and changed the room layout or rearranged the furniture.
And it has never stopped, although now it is my husband who comes home to find that items have migrated around the house and the sofa is in a new place. And this is because I truly believe that home is a feeling rather than a place. That with a gentle re-imagining of a space, you can turn up the feel good volume. Which is why it makes me so very happy to be helping families like yours celebrate the soul of their homes.
Because home is our retreat. And when there is a whole heap of busy busy and uncertainty swirling around us, home is “the nicest word there is”. (Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie). A place to restore and to be together.
My website will give you the lowdown of how I design for your home and you might spot that some of my packages come with cake. You can thank Auntie J for that! But here in the ramble room (blog), I want to regularly share with you all the joys of home.
In these weekly words you will find a sprinkling of simple and heartfelt styling ideas and tips. My little way of giving you the resources and the confidence you need to shape your home, always bearing in mind that practicality prevails in daily life. I will share with you how to bring the outside in (and I don’t just mean snipping holly in winter, though don’t quote me on that at Christmas) and how our homes can reflect the seasons and why this is such a wonderful thing. I am not a tree hugger, but I think mother nature might be my god!
Delicate little drops of snow from my garden.
I will give you the tools and inspiration you need to ramp up all the soul fuelling stuff in your home; the cosy, the homely, the nourishing, the joyful, the being together, the quiet and the memory making moments. I will explore how our homes affect our senses and how they can boost our wellbeing, drawing on actual proper research alongside my own experiences.
And of course, alongside all of this, you will also get some little smile making homeshaped stories from our doer upper the #woodchipwonderland. So grab a cuppa and join me each week to enjoy your home even more than before.