News

Five top tips when choosing an interior design course

How do you decide what interior design course to take? There are so many on offer out there that it’s difficult to sift through all the possibilities. Here are our five key factors that will help you consider the pro’s and con’s of a degree vs an intensive one-year course. Yes, obviously there’s a slight bias to one-year intensive courses, as this is what we offer, but these five factors are crucial considerations when you are deciding what type of course you want to take. This is a big decision that your future career depends on and will cost a significant amount of money, so not to be taken lightly!…   READ MORE

Design = opinion

You can’t design without an opinion. Opinions create values – and values make design authentic and meaningful, not flimflam driven by wasteful and disposable trends.  How do we teach this? By challenging our students to design an experience rather than an interior, where the quality of the conceptual idea and how this story is told says as much about creativity than the end design. Most of the time, as interior designers, we have the constraints of a building to work within. This project does not have this context – it’s a blank canvas that needs rigorous creative thinking to explore what physical form their experience takes.   The Project – Valuing…   READ MORE

Where are they now? Interior Design short-course graduates

Do you want to achieve your dream of becoming an interior designer? In this week’s blog we showcase just how successful our students are and how they have achieved their dream interior design careers. These three Certificate course graduates are just a few of the many students who have studied with us and have gone on to achieve success as professional interior designers. They all came to their courses with strong business skills, which combined with the skills and knowledge they learnt during the Interior Design School modular courses, gave them a head start to develop flourishing careers in the Interiors industry. One of our unique teaching approaches is to…   READ MORE

How do you recharge your creative batteries?

Exhibitions and Christmassy things we’re going to catch before they close in January. We are all looking forward to the Christmas break and use it as a chance to recharge our creative batteries. So much to see and do during these next few weeks, it’s difficult to fine tune but here are our top picks for some visual and creative inspiration…. Christmas lights throughout central London are always worth a night time visit – after the shops have closed, when it’s a little quieter..We love Soho ho ho ho ho – this year’s clear winners! Renzo Piano at The Royal Academy The Art of Making Buildings Not to be missed-…   READ MORE

Dreaming of a simpler Christmas!

It’s that lovely time of year again – the smell of mulled wine, the mince pies, the ridiculous reindeer sweaters! The present buying, putting up the tree and decorations, lots of delicious food and drink. But hang on – let’s just stop for a minute. Keep it simple Maybe this is the year to simplify and look at some alternative ways of doing things? Some different ways of giving gifts and decorating our houses? Ways of being a little bit greener? Scandi Christmas The Scandinavians know how to do it – for them it’s all about the atmosphere, not the material things. It’s about creating memories and spending time with…   READ MORE

Explore interior design and transform your life

Fancy learning how to design your own home like a professional? Or even go on to become a professional interior designer? February sees the start of our Module One Interior Basics course – held on Thursday evenings with three intensive Saturday workshops. It’s the first module of what can build into our Professional Interior Design Certificate – four sequential modules that takes up to two years to complete.   At the end of the four modules you will be able to practice as an interior designer working in residential design. One of our graduates, Rosie Armstrong, transformed her career from fashion to interiors on our two year evening programme and now…   READ MORE

Residential design and beyond

Our Diploma students have just completed their first major project The brief was to design a home for a professional couple. The site is a residential semi-industrial loft space and the students have all produced brilliant schemes ranging from uber-minimal to the most lavish luxury (we don’t impose a budget so their ideas can run free!). Its their first chance to put into practice all the skills they’ve learnt in these first weeks of the Diploma course – the first time they’ve experienced the full design process up to client presentation.   We featured in our last blog one of the key tutors working on this project, Lucy Clark. She…   READ MORE

The luxury interiors of Lucy Clark

We would like to introduce you to Lucy Clark, founder and creative director of Studio Clark + Co, Lucy has joined our teaching team and is currently working with our Diploma students on their second project – a residential loft apartment set in a semi-industrial building in London. With experience of managing design teams, Lucy realised the need to share her design knowledge with young designers and so we invited her to be part of our team as she has such an amazing pedigree in high-end interior design projects and our students will learn so much from her experience. Lucy was a student with us twelve years ago and had…   READ MORE

Is interior design Art?

“Am I creative enough to be an interior designer?” Most people use the word creative within the context of ‘Art‘, where they think that creativity means an ability to draw, use colour and paint, sculpt, or put things together in an ‘artistic’ way. We see it differently. We think of creativity in interior design as innovation – being able to recognise a problem, understand it, figure out the boundaries for the solution, and come up with innovative ideas to solve the problem. This is the art of being an interior designer. Interior design is the alchemy of aesthetics, science, analysis and lateral thinking. Unlike a fine artist who can be pretty…   READ MORE

How do you develop your interior design career?

If you’re an aspiring or established interior designer you will be constantly thinking about how you’re going to develop your career. What comes next? How do you raise your professional profile? To give you some starting points, we thought we’d ask one of our long-standing tutors, Jenny Grove, to give us her thoughts. Jenny is the author of Interior Design: A Professional Guide, published by the RIBA. Having worked for years as a designer, Jenny now helps interior designers find their professional voice through strategic content writing. Her website explains what she does in more detail. Jenny recommends asking yourself four questions:   1. What makes me different – and…   READ MORE