British interior designer Sophie Paterson has built a distinctive interiors business around a clear point of view, but she is just as thoughtful about what sits behind the finished rooms as the rooms themselves.
Talking at Livingetc Unlocked last week, the designer explained a little about her career history, and how she built her brand from scratch, inspired by a passing comment on the design of her own home.
She started with no formal interior design training, no team and very little confidence. Nearly two decades later, she runs a 20-person studio and has expanded into product, education and community. Along the way, she has learned how to recognize the right opportunities, protect a creative vision, listen properly, build an audience, and create a business that can keep evolving.
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These are the lessons that shaped it.
1. “Trust Your Gut”
Ask Sophie for the best piece of advice she has ever been given, and the answer is immediate: “Trust your gut.” Ask for her biggest career mistake, and the answer is just as quick: “Not trusting my gut.”
It now informs everything from the projects she accepts to the people she chooses to work with. “There are some clients that I said yes to that ended up being some of the most difficult situations, and I did know on some level they weren’t the right fit.”
Experience has taught her to recognize the warning signs, from unrealistic expectations around budget to a reluctance to respect the studio’s process. “That doesn’t mean they’re a bad client. They might just not be a good fit for me.”
There is also a cost to saying yes to the wrong thing. “When you say yes to that client and that project, you might be missing out on one down the line that would be a better fit for you.”
2. “You’re Not Going to Get the Projects That You Want Straight Away”
Sophie’s first interior design commission came almost by accident. A developer visiting the first home she shared with her husband asked who had designed it. She was 23 and so unsure of herself that she did not want to admit it was her. “My husband was elbowing me in the ribs saying, ‘It was you. Tell him it was you.'”
She eventually agreed to take on one of his projects, although with so little confidence that she initially offered to do it for free.
Those early jobs were not necessarily the projects she dreamed of, but Sophie quickly understood that an opportunity does not have to be perfect to be valuable. “You’re not going to get the projects that you want straight away. There’ll be something wrong with them. They might not have the budget. It might not be the most beautiful project.”
The question is what you can get from it. “You need to just find something that you can photograph or some value, something that you’ll learn.”
On one early project, there was no budget left for art, rugs or accessories, so she borrowed pieces from suppliers, hired a van and stripped objects from her own house to style the shoot. “You’ve just got to make it work.”
That same instinct led her to invest early in photography. “Without images, you really can’t have new projects. You don’t have a brand.” Her advice now is simple: “Take site photos, before photos, after photos.”
3. “You Can Become Pigeonholed Quite Quickly as a Designer”
There is an obvious advantage to having an identifiable aesthetic. Clients know what they are buying into. But Sophie is wary of the point at which a signature becomes a formula.
She describes her own style broadly as “classic contemporary” and remembers the moment clients began arriving with images of her previous work, asking for versions of particular rooms. “It was really flattering.”
But it also made her cautious. “You can become pigeonholed quite quickly as a designer, and you don’t want to just replicate the same design time and time again.”
One of her earliest clients actually told Sophie she hated her style but liked her enough to hire her anyway. The project pushed her somewhere completely different and remains on her website almost 18 years later. “I’m always trying to get clients that actually don’t want to do something that I’ve always done because it’s more fun for me and my team.”
Her own homes have become testing grounds for that evolution too. Her current house helped establish the look many clients now associate with her, while the next will be more pared back, architectural and antique-led. “I love antiques. I think it’s really sustainable. I think it adds a lot of character. I think the quality you get for the money is brilliant. It’ll be quite interesting to see if my clients get on board with that.”
4. “Listening Is a Really Important Skill of Any Designer”
For all the attention placed on having an eye, Sophie thinks listening matters just as much.
“Sometimes we’ll be practicing a presentation and someone on the team will rush in and say, ‘I’ve looked at the floor plan; we should do this, this, and this.’ I’m like, hang on. We don’t even know how the client wants to use it yet.”
The job is not simply to arrive with the best idea. “Really make sure that not only are you listening to your client, but that they feel heard and they feel listened to.”
Renovating her own home has made Sophie even more conscious of how the process feels from the other side. Clients are spending large amounts of money and handing over control of something intensely personal. When something goes wrong, the designer is often the person delivering the news.
Her rule is simple: “Never respond straight away. I’m very calm, always. Inside, I might not feel calm, but I always give myself a moment so that I seem it. You don’t have to respond to everything straight away.”
5. “I Undercharged for a Long Time, and I Didn’t Even Know I Was Doing It”
One of Sophie’s most important business lessons came when the studio started looking properly at time.
“I undercharged for a long time, and I didn’t even know I was doing it.”
The fees sounded substantial, but so were the projects, and nobody was properly accounting for the hours involved. The turning point came when a new finance director asked how much time the team was actually spending on each job. I was like, I don’t know. We just do what needs to be done.”
When they finally calculated the hours on one major international project, the answer was sobering. “We probably hadn’t made any money. It cost us money.”
Her advice now is to quantify time from the beginning: work out what your hourly rate needs to be, estimate the job, and then track what actually happens. “You won’t get it right, but at least you’ll start this process. Everyone underestimates how long it takes to design a project.”
6. “Build an Audience”
Asked what she would do first if she were starting again now, Sophie does not hesitate: “Build an audience.”
She began using Instagram partly because working alone was lonely. “I didn’t have a team to bounce ideas off. I didn’t have like-minded friends to talk about beautiful designs with or difficult clients.”
Social media gave her community before it gave her clients. It also offered something traditional PR could not at that stage of her career. “PR and press were really intimidating to me. I didn’t have the budget to hire a great PR firm. Whereas I did have the time, I did have the energy and the inclination to do social media.”
The platform has changed since then. “Back in the day of 2012, I could put a picture of my shoes, and I’d get 5,000 likes. Now we literally sell our soul for likes and follows.”
But Sophie still thinks the opportunity lies in showing more of the real work. “Show the not glamorous moments.” The site visits, samples, decisions, setbacks, and practical details designers may take for granted can be exactly what audiences want to see. “Share that, and you’ll build an audience.”
7. “You Can’t Take on More and More Clients”
Building an audience opened the door to something bigger than simply attracting more interior design work.”You can’t take on more and more clients. There are only so many people you can service at a high level.”
Sophie is equally realistic about the emotional cost. “I really pour my soul into my clients’ projects, but you can only do that so much before you burn out.”
That made diversification a deliberate part of the business. Product collaborations allowed her aesthetic to reach far beyond a relatively small number of private clients. Education followed through the Sophie Paterson Academy, while The Moodboard created a membership community for designers looking for advice, support and connection.
The thinking behind them is consistent: take the expertise built through the studio and find other ways to share it. “I think a rising tide lifts all ships. If I share my design process and that helps another designer, that doesn’t take anything away from me.”
For Sophie, community is not just another revenue stream. It grew from the same thing that drew her to Instagram in the first place: not wanting creative work to feel isolating.
8. “Please Make a Different Mistake Next Time”
Sophie has no interest in pretending that building the business has been a flawless process. “I’ve made so many mistakes.”
But she is equally clear that the aim is not to eliminate them altogether. “I don’t mind if someone on my team makes a mistake. I just say to them, please make a different one next time.”
That willingness to learn has shaped the way she approaches opportunity too. “I always think you need to go after what you want.”
“With pretty much all of my product collaborations, I went to them with a proposal and said that I’d love to do this. Plenty of brands said no, which is fine. You just sort of dust yourself off and move on to the next one.If I just sat here and waited for all the amazing brands that I want to work with me to come, it wouldn’t have happened.”
One piece of advice from early in her career still guides which opportunities she accepts. When Sophie was considering a well-paid partnership that did not feel quite right, a marketing mentor asked her to think about the person she admired most in the industry. “If they said yes to this, would your perception of them change? Whatever your answer is for them is what you should apply to yourself.”
It changed the way she thought about building a brand. “You don’t want to just be building towards where you are. You want to be aspiring to the best version of you you can be.”
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