You're listening to the Arch Publications Business Insight podcast. I'm Katie O'Regan
and we are publishers of magazines which are delivered free each month into 33,500 homes
across Holmes Chapel, Sambach, Middlewich and Congleton, lovely Cheshire towns and villages.
Our magazines advertise businesses and we run articles and editorials which delve into
the owners behind those businesses. We find out what makes them tick and learn more about
their expertise. Coming up in this edition I speak to Mark from the Design House by Interior
Motives. They have a retail space of beautiful items for your home and he's part of a very
talented interior design team all based in the village of Holmes Chapel Cheshire. Business
Insights with Arch Publications hosted by Katie O'Regan. So we're here at the Design
House by Interior Motives which is just off Manilane in Holmes Chapel and it's been here
for over a year now which I feel like has been the fastest year of my life and I'm here
with Mark who is the owner along with your partner Max and we're having a chat, we're
having a catch up because I did come in and see you when you first opened and it'd be
nice just to see how things have been going but just give us a bit of an outline about
how you got to this point where you've got this fabulous retail space in Holmes Chapel.
So Interior Motives as a company had been trading for over 12 years and we decided having
come through lockdown that we needed to do something new. We needed to expand a little
bit because of the demand we were getting. We'd been notified by a number of different
people that they'd perhaps made mistakes. Buying and shopping online isn't always necessarily
the best thing to do for your home. People get sizes wrong all the time. So we felt there
was an opportunity out there where we could create something that could emphasise design
and living spaces. As you can see here today we've got different room sets that people
can see and see how you can style your home. But it was really, we felt that the design
house can then emphasise how everything can be done under one roof which is a service
that we can offer. Anybody with a blank set of plans or a blank room or blank canvas can
come in and we can help them design everything through from the flooring through to the paint
colour to the sofa to the light fittings to the window dressings. It can all be done
and selected all under one roof. Yeah so just to explain when you come in the unit you come
upstairs and you've got a lovely kitchen set up and you've got a lounge. You can imagine
what your lounge is going to be like with some lovely sofas and then a very nice large
bed and then a lovely dining room area and it would be my dream set up for a home I think
because it's all beautiful. It's very much like a large apartment. It is! Yeah it is!
The only thing we're missing is a bathroom. Yeah. Yeah no I think it was really to try
and show and demonstrate you know how you can mix and mix colours and how they can blend
together so you don't have to have the same colour in every room but then actually sort
of working with the same sort of colour palette you can then mix that and then work it through.
It's not just a showroom though is it because you've got lots of lovely pieces that you
can buy ranging from candles to sofas. It's amazing. Absolutely yeah everything really
from a candle stick to a diffuser to artwork to wall lights, ceiling lights and of course
a library that shows a lot of wallpapers and fabrics as well. So I could come in today
for someone's birthday and take away something beautiful couldn't I? Absolutely yeah and
yeah to suit everybody's purses and budgets as well really. Yeah I have actually spotted
a set of candles that I am going to take away. I will pay for them. My husband wants to buy
that chair over there which is really beautiful. People in Holmes Chapel probably will remember
you from when you were based in the village which how long ago was that? Gosh we're going
back about eight years I think now. Yeah you were on the corner which is now the ice cream
shop homesuit home. Absolutely yeah and I think at the time Holmes Chapel was going
through a change. We'd seen a lot of the high street banks move out of the village and I
think we really felt that our business at that time our core business was contract work
and I think we've sort of seen the contract work develop and that's another side of the
business that we still deal with but we're very much heavily emphasised now on working
with private clients with homeowners and we're working with everybody from whether it's their
own home to whether they've got holiday homes. We've done a number of Air B&Bs in various
cities around the UK and that's been really interesting and really good to work on. When
you think about having an interior designer to come in and do some work for you I always
worry that it's going to be expensive. What is the kind of starting cost for something
like that? I think we always look at the bigger picture and we look at how big the project
is going to be. We don't have a set structure or set fees and we always like to say our
first meeting is free perhaps just a cup of tea or a cup of coffee is the only payment
that's needed but from there we then sit down with the client and understand the brief that
they have and their time scale that they want to work to and then really understand how
much involvement they want because some people are quite happy to do their own thing but
just want the ideas putting together in perhaps design boards or mood boards which we're quite
happy to work with clients and do that. If not then we will create a shopping list and
a lot of clients enjoy the fact that we will do the shopping for them. We go to our supply
chain we bring everything in as you can see downstairs we've got a massive warehouse space
so everything comes in here and then we then take that out to our clients we install it
all we have a dedicated team of installation fitters and curtain installers so we install
everything and then we even take all the cardboard and packaging away and then everything's
done for them. And you tidy up as well. We do yeah we do get our Henry out every now
and again. Oh I love that. What you're saying is that it doesn't matter really what your
budget is you can come out and say look you can have these ideas and they can go away
and you know look at it themselves or you can just do everything. Absolutely yeah I
mean we've done it recently with a client who has simply wanted just some wallpaper
for a feature wall and we've been able to help them we've chosen the wallpaper and we've
even specified a paint colour for them to go with that and they've got their decorator
installing. We do get a number of people that come to us and say I haven't got a clue where
to start I don't know anybody we've just moved into the area do you know a local decorator
and we do work with a number of different trades that we can then put those trades in
touch with our you know our new clients and they help them out. How do you work out what
someone's going to like I know you said you'd take a brief but what is it you know what
would you ask me. I think the big thing is to find out what you've seen already if you've
got a lot of people are using the internet things like Pinterest and Instagram the following
designers they may have stayed in hotels where they've enjoyed a certain room colour and
they've built their own sort of if you like small portfolio of images of things that they
want to do and what they like and then it's then starting to put ideas in front of them
that we see the reaction of whether it's a yes or a no. Yeah and you have done some quite
big properties as well haven't you. I think last time we talked about that you've done
some really large decadent houses. We have yeah and it's a real mixed bag we've got a
project on the on the on the go at the moment which is for a 1980s built house that we were
going in and redesigning that knocking walls out and creating large spaces. We've worked
with a thinker over a farmhouse in Mallorca which was an exciting project and that involved
again creating space knocking walls down. We've worked in 16th century thatched cottages
and even penthouse apartments in city centres so we work with a very much a mixed bag of
different houses and different styles. We're quite lucky I suppose as well we've got that
broad range of properties because you obviously work across the whole of Cheshire and it sounds
like the whole of the country as well but in Cheshire we do have a real mixed bag of
different properties that you can go and work in. Yeah very much so yeah I mean obviously
that there's lots of 1970s houses that were built in the last sort of the boom many years
ago 50 years ago when you know a lot of people moved out of the cities of Liverpool and Manchester
but we've also got a lot of modern houses as well being built and I think sometimes as
the builders always say they like to provide you with the house but they don't provide
you with a home and that's where our job comes in that we help the client then convert that
house into a home with lots of nice things that you can buy from the showroom. Yeah that
you've you know got on display some of the fabulous obje d'or. Absolutely. Is that what
you call it? Nicknacks I think. Tell me about what your plans are over this year then you're
obviously selling you've got beautiful stuff to sell are you going to continue doing that?
Very much so yeah I think certainly the last 12 months has shown what's been popular. We've
just all popular diffusers everybody loves the smell of the diffusers as you walk in.
Yeah certainly been very popular even though we've always sort of had that knee jerk and
that cringe about going online we are going to go online. Okay. So we are working with
our design team at the moment in starting to look at uploading images of soft furnishings
that we're going to be selling online as the first sort of start into that new venture.
We've got lots of projects on the go that we're working with as you can see we've had
some new redesigns in the showroom with new wallpapers we've got a fabulous new company
that we're working with from Italy that are bringing and developing a silk wallpaper so
that's come in slightly wider than the normal but the textures are very very different.
Is that the one here the greeny coloured one on the wall? Yeah yeah. Decorators cringe
because it's a metre and 20 wide so yeah nearly obviously well over twice the normal size.
What's the benefit of having silk is it just the way it looks? Just the way it looks the
reflection that you get. Oh it does look really nice. Also you have a fabulous wallpaper which
has got birds and greenery which is stunning. The green colours at the moment those sort
of pastel colours that we have you know the terracotta, the rust, the green are still very
very popular. Certainly lots of tropical textures with in fabrics and in wallpapers have been
introduced to from our suppliers to the market and they just throw something different in
a room design. So people can if they want to just have a browse they're absolutely very
welcome to come in and have a browse. Yeah yeah we're open six days a week from nine
to five Monday to Friday and then Saturdays 10 till three. There's always somebody here
and we're always somebody you know able to lend a hand and give some advice and if we
haven't got it on the shelf or displaying it then we can source it from our database
of suppliers that we work with. And what about furniture then do you have a cat because
obviously you have got sofas here but there must be more you can get. Absolutely yeah
yeah we're now working with a sofa manufacturer based in Europe. Lead time is possibly standard
as with most furniture suppliers and there's a lot of different styles and textures of
fabrics that you can choose from. But then again we also have a number of UK companies
we work with that can do spoke furniture and one off so yeah. We did touch on the new wallpapers
the silk what are the trends did you think we've got coming in 2023. Feature walls are
still very popular a lot of people are going more for texture particularly in sort of areas
where like linen wallpapers come in and they have that nice sort of feel to them. There's
no real set colour although grey is not necessarily the new colour as it was. Is it like a sand
colour. I think the new word is grey. Is that like a sandy kind of. It's a sandy grey colour
yeah that's the top mix with grey. Yeah it has you know people have often thought grey
has been a little bit cold and I mean when there's too much it can be but I think the
benefit of it now is that the colours that are coming out the popular colours of the
greens and the oranges the rusts the terracotta sits so well with grey. Black is still very
popular as you can see we've got quite a few black things with benches and stools and
things. We've had lots of new fabrics come through like a boucle fabric which is the
texture which we have on the bed that we've got on display so there's lots of that coming
through. Just give me a bit of your background of how you trained to do this then. What was
your history not that long ago. No no no not at all I've fallen into this from a great
height. I've been involved in housing and property for gosh since 30 odd years ago I
was dare I say an estate agent many many years ago. I was yeah a long time ago but Maxine
before she moved to the north west had her own curtain workroom and was a designer down
in London and her trip sort of travels took her from London up to Scotland and then down
to Cheshire and she's been in Cheshire now for over sort of 20 25 years and she's been
here. You are a couple couple as well aren't you. We are yeah we're married. Yeah we are
married. So where did you meet then. We met in a wine bar in Sandbatch many many moons
ago yeah. Right nice. And you both happened to be in an industry that you like the similar
industry. Yeah I was selling new houses at the time and Maxine was designing for a number
of celebrities and different companies working from Knutsford and we got chatting and various
things and a few glasses of wine later and yeah yeah. And you've got children as well
haven't you. We have yeah we have both been married before. Yeah we've got the blended
family. Do they work for the business too. Holly our daughter she's just gone on maternity
leave so we were expecting our first grandchild at the end of April. That will have the best
nursery in Cheshire. Oh absolutely it's just been finished this weekend. Yeah. And we don't
know what we've done to the other two because one's one side of the world and the other's
the other. Charlie's following his dreams of playing football over in America. Wow.
And amazing my daughter she's off in Vietnam teaching English. That is amazing. Yes. Where
abouts in Vietnam. She is in Saigon. Wow that is absolutely amazing. You've obviously brought
them up well to be adventurous. That's why we've got no money. And we're still having
to keep working. Yeah yeah well I hope you keep working forever because obviously you
do some amazing designs and you've got some amazing stuff here. So how do you keep on
top of trends then. We're in we're in touch with obviously our supply chain all the time.
We constantly and see and we visit trade shows and there's lots of information that the design
network sends out on a regular basis. So we're seeing stuff all the time from latest lighting
to fabrics and artwork etc. So yeah we're in touch with stuff all the time. And do you
like being creative then if someone was to say you've got a blank canvas do what you
want would that be your dream scenario. Absolutely yeah I think I often take a backseat and I
sort of manage the budget and the purse strings more but the design team do love to sit down
and get and think right. And it's often something that we see it's just the odd wallpaper or
the odd bit of fabric that we suddenly see and think oh my god where can we use that
in our next design because it is so striking that where clients allow us to be creative
we can really then go to town and introduce that. Just some people say I've got this sofa
that's the only thing I want to keep work around the sofa. Absolutely yeah I think that's probably
what I would do. Yeah and then start afresh with everything else. Yeah absolutely yeah
so it's really been very nice to catch up with you again and the message is if you just
fancy a little trip out to Holmes Chapel then come and have a look inside the design house
there's free parking outside there's lots of amazing bits that you can pick up to buy
from as we said candles glasses you've got full furniture chairs you've got lighting
so many wonderful things if you wanted to treat yourself which is always nice or if
you have something to buy for somebody else this is absolutely the perfect place to come.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the Arch Publications Business Insight
podcast you'll be glad to know we did buy the chair and it's very chic and very comfortable.
To hear more inspiring interviews from local businesses across Cheshire subscribe on your
favorite podcast platform and to check out our magazines either through your front door
or if you're out of our delivery area you can find them on our website archpublications.com
and I'll be back very soon chatting to another Cheshire business. Business Insights with
Arch Publications hosted by Katie O'Regan.