Travel as a philosophy.
Travel, done properly, is one of the most transformative things a person can do. The memories formed on a great journey – the guide who changes how you see a place, the dinner that spontaneously stretches across four hours, the morning you wake up somewhere so beautiful it takes a moment to realise you’re not still dreaming – stay with us for years. I hold that seriously. I’m not booking holidays, I’m designing the experiences that become the stories people tell for the rest of their lives.
For the last 10 years I’ve worked as a luxury travel designer creating bespoke journeys for high and ultra-high net worth clients, working with people who expect the extraordinary as a baseline, and who need someone they can trust completely to deliver it.
My career in travel has been spent inside some of the most discerning businesses in the world — from a concierge company catering to some of the UK’s most elite athletes, founding and running my own boutique agency, River House Private Travel, to creating breathtaking experiential itineraries with Blue Marble Private. The work spans every scale and complexity: a 28-night odyssey across New Zealand, an ethereal honeymoon in Namibia, or a a fully private after-hours viewing of Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan. The thread connecting all of it is the same: matching clients with experiences that matter deeply to them, and a commitment to getting every detail right.
Before I designed journeys, I styled wardrobes.
I spent years as a personal stylist working with private clients across London and Surrey, consulting for high-end designer boutiques, and as part of the innovation team at Marks & Spencer where I helped build and scale their digital styling service from an idea to a nationally launched product. My clients were largely women navigating significant life transitions — stepping back into the world after a marriage ended, pushing for a promotion, trying to rediscover who they were now that there were children in tow. What they hired me for was never really a wardrobe. It was clarity. Someone who could see them and their goals objectively, and reflect something true back.
I also spent time working with the UK's leading art gallery advising private clients on contemporary and investment pieces, visiting homes to understand how a work lived in a space. A different discipline, but the same instinct: what is actually right for this particular person, in this particular life?
A great travel designer, like a great interiors or fashion stylist, needs to hold a client's identity in their mind — not just what they say they want, but what actually works for them. The instinct for what’s right for this particular person, the ability to earn trust quickly and use it carefully, all of that came from my earlier career, and all of it informs how I design travel.
The most extraordinary journeys don't happen by accident.
It begins in a conversation, one in which I’m listening as carefully to what a client doesn't say as to what they do. The brief that arrives first is rarely the final itinerary and my job, at the outset, is to understand the actual trip, not the described one.
What that requires, beyond listening, is the ability to read a person accurately. Most clients don't arrive with a fully formed sense of what they want – they arrive with a feeling, an occasion, sometimes just a vague sense that the last trip didn't quite do it. Translating that into something specific is where the work really begins.
My first-hand knowledge is part of how I do it. More than 35 countries across six continents, approached not as a collector of destinations but as someone genuinely curious about each one, means that when I make a recommendation I'm drawing on real experience, not received wisdom.
A genuine aesthetic sensibility, a trained eye for what is truly exceptional rather than merely expensive, is the other part. It means I can confidently redirect a choice that photographs beautifully but won't feel right to live in for a week. The details I consider – the light in a room, the character of a property – are never incidental. They’re often where the difference between a good trip and the right one is found.
Beyond Travel Design.
When I'm not designing itineraries, I work with a small number of property owners on a question I find equally compelling: what does it actually take to make a space feel extraordinary to a guest who has experienced everything? The same instincts that make a journey unforgettable, the eye for detail, and the understanding of who someone is and what they need, turn out to matter just as much when the experience is a place rather than a trip.