About Our Interior Design Studio
Why we started.
We started Chapter Seven Design in 2015. After years working in other industries, we wanted to build an interior design studio of our own, on our own terms, with a better balance between work and the rest of life.
Andy holds an honours degree in Architectural Technology and spent over twenty years coordinating the technical fabric of major commercial buildings, including the New Street Station redevelopment in Birmingham, before coming to interior design. That background shapes everything. Not because every project is a technical exercise, but because understanding how a building works gives him an entirely different confidence in how to design within it. He reads a home before he designs in it, and he sees what is possible long before most people would think to ask the question.
Joe came from a long career in high-end client management, looking after demanding accounts where the relationships mattered as much as the work. Her job is to make sure that a project with genuine complexity, and all the decisions, suppliers and contractors that come with it, feels clear and manageable for the people living through it. She is the reason clients describe working with us as calm.
The studio takes its name from the seventh chapter of Francis D K Ching's Form, Space and Order. It was the first book Andy was asked to read at university, and it has been a point of reference ever since.
Meet us.
ANDY SMITH
Andy walks into every building looking up. It’s a habit from years in building services. Then he checks the floor. By the time most people have noticed the room, Andy has read the building.
It carries through into his design work. He cares about things most people would let go: the line of a shadow gap, the way a handle sits in the hand, whether a piece of joinery looks right from across the room as well as up close. Clients tend to notice it most after the project is finished, when they catch themselves looking at things they would never normally look at twice.
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
JOANNE SMITH
Joe is a good listener, and she likes to know who she is working with. By the second meeting she usually knows how you take your coffee, who in your family will have an opinion on the kitchen, and what you actually meant when you said something was "fine."
The rest of her work is the steady, organised business of holding a long project together. The timeline. The suppliers. The hundreds of small decisions a renovation throws up. She also takes real pleasure in the sourcing, finding the right piece, from the right manufacturer, for the right room. When clients tell us afterwards that the whole thing felt easier than they expected, it is because of her.
BUSINESS DIRECTOR