You can feel when a place isn't performing. We find out why, then tell you exactly what to do about it
design for return
A strategic design approach for places
Design for Return brings design thinking to the entire business model of a place.
It helps you get the best return on your investment – whether that's financial return, return on your time, a lifestyle that works, or a return to a life that feels genuinely intentional.
Our two programmes have been created for investor/owners of holiday places and individuals looking to change how their place works for them.
About CLAIRE MOOKERJEE
"I don't just think about how a space looks – I think about how it performs: how it attracts, how it prompts, how it retains, how it earns"
Most spaces are designed for appearance. Claire designs for behaviour.
For 20 years that idea has run through everything she has built and advised on. At Gehl Architects in Copenhagen she worked on international city strategies. As Head of Design at Future Cities Catapult, joining as employee number seven and helping grow the organisation to over 150 people, the work was featured in Dezeen, the Guardian and the V&A. As a Built Environment Expert on the Design Council's CABE review panels, it played out at policy level. In 2016 she founded Mookerjee, a BIID accredited interior design agency bringing that same rigour to individual places, with work shortlisted for the Mix Interiors Awards in the hotel category. She holds an MSc in City Design and Sociology from the London School of Economics and a First Class BA in Fine Art from the University of the Arts London.
Borradill is where the methodology was tested. A luxury cabins business on the Scottish coast, named in the FT's Top 40 places to holiday. Occupancy from 30% to 72%. Rates up 120%. 76% of bookings direct. Those results came from treating design, discoverability and commercial strategy as one decision. That methodology is Design for Return.
What Borradill needed was not a renovation. It needed to understand what it was, who it was for, and what story it was telling — and then to build every physical and commercial decision around those answers. That is what Design for Return does. New interiors, a clear identity, a visual world.
No external PR. No paid media. The work sold the place directly.
Within the first year: occupancy moved from 30% to 72%. Weekly rates increased by 120%.
Borradill was named in the Financial Times Top 40 places to holiday in 2025, and featured in The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian and Homes & Interiors.
The methodology is the same one we bring to every project.
Borradill, SCOTLAND
This property began as two underperforming cabins on 25 acres above Loch Sunart on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula.
The landscape was extraordinary. The commercial performance wasn't.
OUR PROOF
the philosophy behind design for return
THE human dimension
We are mammals. We are more shaped by our environments – and the cultures we live in – than we care to admit.
The times we live in ask something specific of us. To take agency over how we spend our time and use our attention. To take responsibility for the shape of our days. To become, in effect, the deliberate leaders of our own small and precious enterprises.
Creating an environment that supports your goals, your focus, your boundaries and your highest values is not a luxury. It is the work. Because willpower alone is not enough. We need prompts. We need rhythms, rituals, tactics. The right environment makes your best intentions the path of least resistance rather than the daily struggle against the current.
Space and Behaviour Over Time
The most beautiful and intelligent places in the world were not designed in one go.
Turning overwhelm into a plan that directs your highest impact investments.
Design for Return is not a one-off refurbishment or rebrand. It is a strategic framework that looks at your place over time — identifying the targeted investments that will get your asset working harder for you, in every dimension that matters.
Return on investment is human and financial simultaneously. The framework uncovers the interventions most likely to give the highest return — not just financially, but in how well a space supports the life or business it is designed for.
For investors and owners in the holiday and hospitality space. For individuals and families designing the life they actually want to live.
What This Means In Practice
In property, skip this stage at your peril.
If you don't map different ways to reach your desired outcomes — higher revenue, a better lifestyle, more flexibility in how your home performs — you risk spending significant time, energy and money creating something that addresses the symptom rather than the cause.
Confidence and clarity is how expensive mistakes are avoided. Less indecision. Less time wasted. Fewer u-turns. No costly oversights.
Before the architect. Before the estate agent. Before the builder. This is the stage where you define what you actually need — and it is the most valuable stage of all.
The Design For Return Programme
A strategic design approach for places - helping you achieve clarity on the why, giving you ideas for the what and a roadmap for the how.
A hilltop town. A sprawling old farmhouse. A harbour that has grown around the way people actually work and live. These places developed over time — responding to climate, adapting to daily life, collecting intelligence, telling stories.
During the modern era we moved away from this. Preferring fixed, one-off investments in layout, refurbishment and plan. A single moment of decision followed by decades of living with the consequences.
Strategic design moves away from that static approach. It looks at longer timelines, phased investments, trial and learning. It understands that the most intelligent spatial decisions are rarely made all at once — they evolve, respond and improve over time. Design at its core is intelligent evolution. And the places that understand that consistently outperform the ones that don't.
one method, two programmes
Design for Return has developed two distinct programmes built for the social and market dynamics of now.
The holiday let market is in the middle of a fundamental shift. Property that once earned simply by existing – appreciating, filling, returning – now has to work for its returns in an entirely different way.
The top end is pulling away. The middle is stagnating. The difference between them is not location or budget. It is whether design, identity and commercial strategy were built together from the beginning – or bolted on afterwards when the numbers stopped working.
The guests driving this market are looking for experiences that give them something their everyday lives don't – genuine rest, offline time, physical challenge, human connection, a sense of place that feels specific and irreplaceable. Properties built for those guests are outperforming the market. Properties that aren't are feeling it.
At the same time the operational landscape is changing. Direct bookings, AI-driven discovery, dynamic pricing, platform algorithms – the tools available to independent operators are more powerful than they have ever been. Combined with a strong creative foundation they compound quickly. Without one they simply optimise something mediocre.
Property is no longer a speculative asset. It has become a service business. And the returns are now found in operational efficiency, market fit and market reach.
At Borradill on the Atlantic coast of Scotland, applying the Design for Return framework to a single property increased occupancy from 30% to 72% and achieved a 120% rate premium — not through cosmetic renovation, but through a strategic understanding of what the property needed to do and who it needed to do it for.
A strategic design process identifies the specific opportunities and strengths of a property and determines what targeted investment – in fit-out, online storytelling, discoverability or wellness offerings – would maximise growth potential and returns.
The methodology is the same one we bring to every project.
The requirement for intentional living has never been more intense. Economic and social change is reshaping how we work, where we live and what we can afford. Creating an everyday life that supports your goals, builds good habits and reflects clear financial priorities is essential – and yet it is precisely the thing most people never make time to design deliberately.
For professional individuals and couples, the rigour applied at work rarely makes it home. The left-brained spreadsheet and the right-brained mood board rarely meet. Desire and lifestyle imaginings don't usually share space with hard market realities and the cold facts of how life actually works. And yet the decisions about where and how you live are among the biggest personal finance, health and wellbeing decisions you will ever make.
In a market where financial returns on property improvements are no longer guaranteed, it is more important than ever to be clear on the lifestyle returns you are looking for. That means starting with the life you want to unfold there – and then mapping the leanest, most desirable and genuinely feasible path to get there.
This is where confidence emerges. Confidence and clarity on what your investment will actually return – financially, relationally and in the quality of daily life.