INSPIRED INTERIOR DECORATION, DESIGN, SOFT FURNISHINGS & UNIQUE IDEAS FOR THE HOME

Welcome to Beautiful Rooms. We are an English company based in both the UK and Australia.

This is where you'll find some great ideas for professionally learning about interior design, running your own business and designing and decorating your own home. You'll also find beautifully original ideas such as our exclusively designed stencils, soft furnishings, gift ideas and decorative accessories for the home as well as a delightful collection of handmade Christmas decorations on our At Home For Christmas page.

My name is Nadine Higgins and I'm an English interior designer and writer currently living in Australia having worked as a designer and run a business in the UK for the last 20 years where I gained a background in art, textile design, art history as well as fashion, architecture, retail sales and business management. I was lucky in that I was trained by the best. I received personal schooling by a highly skilled professional who'd done his apprenticeship in both Harrods of London and the popular high street home design chain, Habitat.

My business really began when my husband left me and our two small children, We faced what many single parents endure most days. A crippling shortage of money and a serious lack of options because of the uncompromising need to work while bringing up a family alone. That was almost 20 years ago. Today, I own my own very successful international retail and publishing company based in both Australia and the UK.

I am also the author of no less than 6 globally best selling guides and 8 online business courses, teaching women and men all over the world, how to start up their own business within the creative arts industry. We have students in many countries including the US, UK, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. I also design my own brand of exclusive interiors, decorating products, soft furnishings and Christmas decorations for the home design market.

When my marriage ended, I was an unemployed mother of two very young children with a large mortgage and no money. We were facing a very uncertain time and with no family support, the future looked bleak. Remembering my love of art and that I could draw, I began designing stencils for interior decoration. It wasn’t long after that I began designing and decorating children’s rooms and working between the hours of my own children being at school, I was soon running my own decorating business from home. Eventually I opened a shop selling my own designs and that soon grew into a nationally based very successful mail order business. Within 10 years, we began selling our designs internationally and I began writing about the industry. By this time our products were selling to countries as far away as the US and Middle East.

It was after a series of letters from women asking for help in starting their own business, that I wrote and published our first book on how to start a business from home. This has since sold all over the world along with further titles and our very popular online courses’.

Since then, I have coached and personally mentored literally hundreds of women into successful businesses, careers and lives with ongoing support to many still continuing. I now own and run my own international retail and publishing business, www.beautiful-rooms.com specialising in interior design and decorating as well as writing about the industry.

Because of our success and also because of various magazine features and interviews, lots of people, mums mainly, wrote in asking how they could run a similar creative business from home too. They had received the college training, some had degrees in the creative arts but none of them had gained any business skills or basic training on how to run a business with all it's high and lows. Some of them had tried but had ended up failing miserably and they had got into debt too.

This started my writing career and within a few months I had written and produced our now globally best selling guide on How To Run A Creative Design Business From Home.

I was also very aware that a lot of the design courses on offer were very poor quality, expensive and offered no real direction on how students might forge ahead with a career or business in the design industry. Some of these courses were offering an interior design qualification and start up business package in weeks. In truth, it just isn't possible to learn the necessary skills in a matter of weeks, it takes years and years to learn and because home design is closely linked to high street fashion design, it changes constantly so if you embark on a career in the design industry, prepare to be a permanent student because that is the reality with any career that is fashion led.

My job today is drastically different from my early days as a fledgling interior designer struggling to survive in a retail shop which only just managed to survive a recession. But those hard times are now the roots that my international mail order business is built on so it wasn't such a mistake after all. Today my job is still designing new stencils, home design ideas, decorative ideas for the home, gifts and Christmas decorations but to a much larger, global market. We now sell our designs and exclusive products to customers all over the world.

We have also just produced our first ONLINE, FREE DECORATING, DESIGN, CRAFTS & GIFT IDEAS MAGAZINE and new ideas to produce a series of How To videos are in the planning stage.

I still work from my beautiful design room where I live, not an office. (I could never work in an office.)

And it all started with a box of paints, a colouring book and my two young children keeping me at home.

Today the interior design market is saturated because of too much exposure on TV and in magazines as well as a glut of courses offering a certificate but no real promise of a career within the industry. Many places offering design courses are only interested in collecting fees, they are not telling students how it really is out there in today's market place. They also accept anyone regardless of talent. This is diluting the industry and lowering standards.

The truth is that anyone can follow the latest fashion trend but it takes real talent and and skill to come up with something truly inspirational. If you are naturally talented and artistic, you will succeed. However, interior design is not an academic subject so even if you have done the course and got the bit of paper, if you do not have natural flair and creativity, you will find it difficult to forge ahead in a career.

Anyone thinking of a career in interior design should at least have studied art at school and have a passion for being creative.

If you are thinking of a career in interior design, ask for a copy of our Free Interior Design E Course before you sign up to any course.

We have also just introduced our brand new Beautiful Rooms Decorating & Design Consultant Course too.

I try to be as available as possible to give anyone considering a career in design my full support and honest opinion so feel free to email me at Nadine@beautiful-rooms.com. You might not get an instant response but your email will be read and I will do my best to reply to you.

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