Our Partnership with 1625 Independent People
When we opened Design Seven in November 2024, we wanted it to be more than a design studio. Making good interiors is what we do, but from the start we knew that if we were going to build a business in Bristol, we wanted it to do something useful for the city too. So we spent our first few months looking for a local charity to work with — not for a one-off cheque, but for a proper collaboration where our actual skills could count for something.
We've found it. Design Seven is now partnering with 1625 Independent People, and it's work we're genuinely glad to be doing.
Who are 1625 Independent People?
If you don't know them, 1625 are a Bristol charity working with young people across the South West. They support young people to thrive — preventing homelessness, keeping young people safe, and providing the housing and support they need to build independent lives.
Homelessness among young people is rarely just about a missing roof. More often it sits on top of trauma, a support network that fell away, and a shortage of opportunities. What stands out about 1625 is that they treat all of that at once. They don't just find a young person somewhere to live; they provide the practical support, the life skills and the opportunities that make independence stick.
When we sat down with their team, what came across was how straight they were about the work — no gloss, no sales pitch, just people who clearly care about getting it right. It didn't take long to realise we were pointed in the same direction.
The canvas: Kingsley Hall
With funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, 1625 is taking on a big project — the full restoration of Kingsley Hall, a historic building in Bristol's Old Market.
Kingsley Hall has a long history in the city, and turning a building like it into modern, supportive housing is no small job. We recently got to walk around it in its current state, before any of the heavy work starts. Empty corridors, old architectural details, and a lot of rooms waiting to become something.
Standing in the stripped-back spaces, you could see it. Not in a misty, imaginary way — just clearly: this is where we could be useful. 1625 had the building and the plan. We had the design experience, the supplier contacts, and the appetite to help make it real.
Our part: the spaces themselves
Interiors do more than most people give them credit for. The room you're in shapes how you feel, how well you rest, and — over time — what you quietly believe about your own worth. For a young person coming out of a hard stretch, a bedroom isn't just somewhere to sleep. It's the one space that's theirs, where they can shut the door and feel safe.
That's the thinking behind our side of the Kingsley Hall project:
Nine living spaces. We're co-designing and sourcing furniture for nine individual rooms. The brief we've set ourselves is simple: nothing institutional. We want rooms that feel warm, modern and genuinely liveable — calm colour choices, layouts that make sense for storage and comfort, and furniture that's tough enough for the job but still worth looking at.
A communal area. Community is central to how 1625 work, and young people need decent shared space to relax and get to know each other and their support workers. We're designing a key communal area to do exactly that — somewhere that pulls people in rather than keeping them at arm's length.
Beyond the building: the Skills Partnership
Designing the rooms is the obvious part. But we wanted the partnership to go further than furniture, so we've built a Skills Partnership alongside the refurbishment.
One of the more effective ways to keep a young person out of long-term homelessness is to hand them a skill, some confidence, and a reason to turn up. So Paul, our Creative Director, will be running interior design workshops and hands-on sessions at our studio for the young people 1625 supports.
These aren't afternoons of choosing paint. The plan is to give a real look at how the work actually happens:
Concept and moodboarding — how to pull an idea together visually, and how colour and texture change a room.
Spatial planning — reading a floor plan, working to scale, thinking about how people move through a space.
Sourcing and budgeting — what things cost, how to talk to suppliers, and how sustainability factors in.
The business side — how a studio actually runs, how you deal with clients, and the routes into a creative career that nobody tends to mention at school.
A fair amount of what we do at Design Seven was self-taught, which is its own kind of point: you don't need permission or a specific certificate to be good at this. If a few sessions in our studio show one young person that design is a door they're allowed to walk through, that's the job done.
What happens next
For an independent Bristol business, this is the sort of thing we set out to do in the first place. We're grateful to 1625 for trusting us with it, and to The National Lottery Heritage Fund for making the wider Kingsley Hall project possible.
We'll be documenting it as we go — fabric swatches and floor plans on the studio desks now, dusty progress on site later, and eventually the finished rooms and whatever comes out of Paul's workshops. We'd like you to follow along.
Designing spaces today, inspiring futures tomorrow. We can't wait to get started.
To find out more about 1625 Independent People and the Kingsley Hall Heritage Project — or how to support their work — visit 1625ip.co.uk.