About Heliotrope Homes

 

My career did not follow a perfectly straight line but property was there from the beginning. While I was still at school, I spent many of my summers helping my father with his French property business. It gave me an early understanding of homes, people and the practical work that goes on behind the scenes.

 

After completing two years of my French degree, I decided for personal reasons to defer university for a while. My third year would have been spent abroad, but at that point I wanted to remain in London, so I began looking for work. I landed on my feet with a company that would later become part of LVMH Watch & Jewellery, joining as a receptionist and junior marketing assistant. I was offered the opportunity to move further into marketing and was successful at interview but ultimately decided to return to university and complete my degree.

 

After graduating in June 2001, I immediately worked in secretarial recruitment training as a consultant and sat on the Graduate and College Leavers desk for over a year. Moving away from sales I then spent many happy years as an executive assistant and personal assistant to managing directors and senior managers in various large organisations, including M&S, Sainsbury’s and the NHS. Those roles taught me how to manage competing priorities, understand what busy people need and keep complicated situations moving.

 

I returned to sales as an estate agent in Amersham, Buckinghamshire but ultimately decided my heart lay in designing not selling properties and got some temporary PA work in a few London architecture and interior design firms to test the water, then subsequently trained in interior design within a commercial design and fit-out firm based in Victoria. On my last day of training in 2002, my husband-to-be proposed! I then married and had children. Having married a corporate lawyer whose career would inevitably be demanding, I wanted to create work that could fit around family life while allowing me to maintain a professional identity of my own.

 

I set up my interiors business as a way to keep working, even if, at first, I was largely creating that opportunity for myself in the first years of the business managing our own property moves (3 in 3 years). Then at my son's first birthday party, 6 months after we'd moved out of London to Hampshire, I was asked to help a friend with their property in Wimbledon. And that was the true beginning of Heliotrope. 

 

What began as a practical decision gradually became a long-term business and a way of bringing together many different parts of my experience: property, design, organisation, communication and an understanding of how real people live.

 

Looking back, the path was not especially neat or traditional but it was useful. Each stage taught me something I now bring to my clients: how to listen, how to present a property for sale, how to anticipate problems, manage detail and help people make confident decisions about all aspects of their homes. Most importantly, how they look and feel. Fundamentally it taught me that a home is never simply a building. It is part of a much bigger story, each one unique. .

 

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