Jenni Greenwood - Interior Designer

Jenni is a former student at the university of Chester and graduated in 2009 studying fine art. While doing this she got a weekend job at an interior design firm which she said helped give her an insight into what industry is like which, her role in the interior designers was only a sample girl who created things like mood boards and taking in from the senior designers, however this experience helped her decide that this is what she waned to do as a job.

After her first job she moved onto a bigger design firm which was based in Chester and started taking on more responsibility like full furniture floor plans and electrical lighting. During her time at her job she mentioned that she was approached by a recruiter from LinkdIn. This gave her the opportunity to work in the Caribbean to redesign a house with materials she hadn’t worked with before as she had only lived in the UK. So she had to adapt and expand her knowledge of these materials and different weather conditions to design for something that she had not done before. Along with working with other people in a team rather than just a single interior designer on one project.

The latest move in her career was onto a company she created herself called ‘Greenwood Interior Designers’ this gave her a whole new perspective on Interior design because as she said “You’re not just designing now, you’re thinking about budgets and are you making enough to survive as a company.”

From this session I took away quite a lot of information not just about interior designing as a whole but the skills that are transferable from her situation to my own. For example she spoke about working in an environment she hadn’t before when she went over to the Caribbean and then about her own design company where she had to manage everything.

The key takeaway is that as a designer you have to be adaptable to your surroundings not just in design but in teaching too as things would be thrown your way that are out of your control and its your job to make it work.