My name is Catherine Pooley. I'm an interior designer, interior architect and architect practice. We have 50 staff now in our office based in Chelsea and we look after residential commercial planes, trains, automobiles, anything that moves really. And we do a lot of global work. We have offices in the Middle East and now in Hong Kong too. I sort of fell into it if I'm super honest. I think in your cheer you normally have a creative understanding of what you love and as a child I was always changing my bedroom around and my stepmother was an interior designer and her house was beautiful. So I'm sure in my subconscious that's where I learnt the art. However I then went into the banking industry and I think today that has really helped me structure my business. It is structured like a bank actually. It's very disciplined, lots of layers in terms of hiring. It really helps me understand also on the financial aspect. It makes me very disciplined. So I was living in Asia. I was in Hong Kong 14 years, Singapore 3 years, Vietnam 2 years and we were moving back to the UK and I decided a lot of people in Hong Kong had said, you know, I love your home, where all these items from and I travelled hugely as a child. That's what my parents have instilled in me. So people would ask me where are these items from. So I decided when I was moving back to the UK that I really should open up a boutique in Walton Street and have a home accessory shop. I still have that today and in fact I have the opportunity to let it go and I decided no, it's really been the forefront of my business so many years so I kept it on. So from there someone then asked me to do the house and I built up a small interior design business above the shop and I moved to another shop next store and now we've moved to here and sometimes in life you just put on a pair of roller skates and you end up and you just end up in your direction. So there's so many aspects of being a designer especially having your own company. So look, it's not just about beautiful fabrics and designing and space allocation and lighting. It really for me is I'm at human resources, I'm marketing, I'm PR accountant, I'm so many different factors and I never bored but being a designer obviously I get to travel a lot which is my passion and part of my soul and my being and that's really where I get the most inspiration for all my projects. It's a big, big part of me. My advice would be for interior hiring and interior design and there's lots of criteria here. For me what I'm particularly looking for is someone who's incredibly loyal. Someone who is not going to hop jobs because it takes a long time to train someone on the job. Someone who is dedicated and organised, they have to be really good at a administration. There's a lot of administration to being a really good interior designer. Someone who's fun, they've got to enjoy their job and that's really a very important key aspect of everybody in life, enjoy your job because you're spending more time in your job than you are with your families. A lot of people are very quick to submit saying I don't want to look after the fabrics. Everybody who comes to work with me I say go and work in the fabric department three to six months. Why? It's a really strong part of the industry. It gives you a great opportunity to get to know that harbour and it's an amazing harbour but it's very hard to find fabric sometimes because it's so big and I really think it gets you to know your suppliers. I would like to think that we are not just one brand one style so for example we can do contemporary classical modern British overseas French. There's lots of different styles. We like to design with what the client wants, what the house needs and what is expected of that particular project. So I'd say we're really flexible. We also have the boutique and the boutique offers a home dressing service which is nowadays is a massive part of every interior design job. The other really important factor of my role and my job is that we're doing so many international overseas projects nowadays and having lived in all these countries you know my parents went to Bahrain when I was about seven so having lived in the Middle East in Asia I'm really a mongrel really I've lived everywhere and I went to university in France so for me learning those cultures and understanding how everybody lives so I get to integrate all those laws and regulations and cultures into my designs and I think that really sets me apart from quite a lot. So designing a project at a very outset is quite important most critically you've got to listen to the client you've got to get their brief that's critical. The next thing is to look at the spatial awareness and the floor plans so is there a centerpiece like a fireplace or where is the window where is the light coming through that is really how we start designing. We all get a little bit crazy sometimes and rush to the harbor and find these beautiful fabrics and we start our designs around the fabrics great to do that too you can always integrate them but always start out with the interior architect which is critical. It's a real common mistake that a lot of designers do that they head out with the design they do all the join your package and then they forget about the lighting. For me lighting is one of the most critical aspects in an interior design job because you can do an incredible job of designing and then it looks dull as dishwasher when it's installed so really at the very beginning we like to get a lighting design onboard. You can have a really dark joinery unit and it look very unhappy or sad or dark because it's not being lit very well. You may have used an incredible wood or some beautiful finishes but in fact you're not going to really see those finishes because they haven't got any lighting on it so lighting for me can be anything. I mean even from to the landscape gardening it can light up an entrance. Lighting is warmth, it's home, it's luxury, it's critical. Lighting controls are really critical because there are lots of different clients that want lots of different things. You're getting people nowadays who are highly technical and want the most complicated state of the art lighting system and then you've got people like myself who want something that's really simplistic. Nowadays and I just love dimmer stretches just to be clear but for example turning on the TV these days you have to have five remote controls. I always say the simpler the better don't make it so complicated. Having said that you've got people who are flying in from the helicopters to their homes and they want to make sure that the heating is on and everything is integrated with the fly lit and the music. I mean it's all very romantic but as long as you know how to make that system work for you that's fine. Look I don't follow trends I'm normally hopefully setting them all through them however I love pastels because I'm more of a pastoral person although I should be a winter with my hair color but I'm also very passionate about oranges, orange velvet clara at burgundy's blues but again it's really about the project and what they're dictating. Furniture pieces a lot of reclaimed items nowadays are fascinating and what people are asking for. Design right now is going through a very different stage that there's the the classical's and then there's the contemporaries where you've just got a beautiful chair from an antique shop with a bright orange cushion on it or a yellow cushion or a green cushion. It's changing and I think it's evolving a lot which is really lovely. So for a client and hiring an interior designer I think the most important aspects are deliverance, quality, controlling that quality and when they get where they're going to make all the product. After service care is critical you can't just finish your job and say goodbye you've got to finish it and be there actually for 10 years time. Someone they can trust, someone that listens and gets the brief and someone who's flexible, someone who is happy to take on a client's brief, not your own brief, that never works. What is my favourite project today? I can't really answer that because my clients would be really upset with me because they all think they're my favourite. All my clients say that I need a piece of my soul in their house which is obviously clearly very exhausting and my clients generally speaking always become my friends which is so nice. We're working on an incredibly large project in the south of France. It's the biggest house in the south of France and it's quite classical and it's asking for a lot of attention to detail. I'm loving working on that project. I've also done three or four projects in Q8. Working with these Q8 clients is so special because you have to do a lot of interior architecture where it's integrating the lighting, integrating the air conditioning and all the grills in the paneling. Because the house is a bigger you really get a chance to really design whereas in London you're stuck with a much smaller house than you are overseas. We're working on an amazing palace in Q8 right now which has been a two and a half year project and it's been the most amazing family to work with. The mother has the most incredible taste and for me it's been wonderful to work with her because she's very determined to have her dreams come true and she knows what she wants and that for me has been a great inspiration to work for. It's given us an opportunity to work with some of our suppliers and really push them out of their comfort zones to design things that they haven't got in their actual showrooms. I did a, and it was for me personally years and years and years ago when I first started out in this business and we have a castle up in Scotland and the staircase is going back to the clockways wrong on the clockways and that's because apparently he was a left-hand swordsman and that was going dating back to the 1541s and of course I just didn't think about it. So getting furniture up the staircase was a nightmare. We ended up soaring every piece of furniture in half and having to clamp it together. The benefit of that is I will never do that again. The second thing is no one can ever rob that castle because I'll never get any piece of furniture out so you always learn from your mistakes.