‘I missed Interior Designs Masters’ semi-final but I got lots of job offers’

• Interior Design Masters’ Briony Ace was the latest person evicted from the BBC show.

• In Thursday’s episodes, Ace was partnered with Rita Millat to work on transforming a clothes and jewellery shop floor space. The boys team, Craig Masson and John Cooper, who won stand out space, immediately getting them a place in the semi-final.

• To date, she had won ‘stand out space’ twice putting her designs at the top of the group.

• The designer narrowly missed out on a place in the semi-final and final but it hasn’t held her back when it comes to career opportunities, as she tells Yahoo.

Life after Interior Design Masters

After being sent home, literally the next day in my inbox I had job offers for interior designs. Some things just kind of work out, don’t they? And I just felt so grateful for that. I do lots of residential stuff at the moment and I’ve got one commercial project coming up.

Then I was speaking recently at Grand Designs live where I got to present the stage there and have lots of lovely chats with people. I also truly loved the TV aspect of it as well and would love to look into that in the future as well. I’m lucky enough that since the show I’ve had back to back design work.

From Interior Design Masters, I really learned how to fully lean in and trust in my ability. What I like and my style and how I can develop on that, [and] make that work in real life situations. As I go now, I see how much I learned from the show as well, you really see it start to come together. Just that really tuning into your own gut instinct.

Trusting yourself, you know, being creative, it’s like engineering design is art, isn’t it? Not everyone is going to like the same thing but that’s a great thing. But it’s really important that you really stick and believe in the things that you believe in and that you love and that means something to you and that’s what kind of great design is.

Missing out on Interior Design Masters semi-final

It did feel special though, getting to the quarterfinals and then getting to meet guest judge Mary Portas.

Obviously it would have been amazing to have got to the semi-finals but I was so grateful to get as far as I did. I just can’t complain about any of it because I just loved it so much and loved the others so much as well. We’re all like such great friends at this point. Someone had to go.

We loved the design, Rita and I. I still love it. It was a real life one: [in] the quarter-finals [it] was real humans that you were designing for, which was so amazing. What Leslie and Peter, the shop owners, had done and what they created over the years… It’s this amazing, one-stop shop that you could go and get these unique gorgeous pieces. Leslie will help you pair them up, and you can get your handmade jewellery from from Peter. It was insane.

We just wanted to create this kind of gorgeous backdrop to just let all of that shine, and I really feel like we managed to create that together. What we created was beautiful.

Room for improvement

Could you do things better? Yeah. You get two days to transform the space and you get a week before to design it. There was that little bit of sparkle dust that maybe I could have had.

Initially I was thinking to create this oversized massive lamp shade, just like on week one — I did like a papier-mâché lampshade that was really oversized. It was gorgeous and I ran out of time or brain space.

Could have had a bigger moment with the curtains. They were picked up on by Michelle Ogundehin and Mary that they were just grey curtains. Could there have been a little bit of sparkle with those? Could it have been a print or a colour? The changing rooms definitely could have been an opportunity for something that pizzazz.

Working with Rita