Frieda Gormley’s ‘In the Company of Nature’ charts a business reborn
House of Hackney's Frieda Gormley has written a memoir that tells the story of the B Corp design house rewilding the idea of business itself. Six months after publication, the book has become far more than a founder's tale.
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Frieda Gormley, co founder of House of Hackney, founded the British B Corp interiors brand in 2011 with her husband Javvy M. Royle as an alternative to disposable design, grounded in British craftsmanship with Nature as design muse. Her debut book, ‘In the Company of Nature: Regenerating Business, Community and the Living World’, tells the extraordinary story of how the design house set out to bring Nature into the home and ended up rewilding the idea of business itself.
What began as a personal accounting has evolved into something more expansive. Part memoir, part manifesto, the book shows that change doesn’t start at the top but at the fringe, moving through a journey of beauty, activism, spirituality and systems change to offer an invitation to fall back in love with life and let Nature guide how we build, work and live. The response has been remarkable, carrying Gormley from the academic halls of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard to conversations with her intellectual heroes, each encounter deepening the book’s reach beyond its pages.
House of Hackney became only the second company in the world to legally appoint Mother Nature to its board. That radical commitment to reimagining the relationship between commerce and the living world became the beating heart of her writing. The book describes struggles with investors, chaotic board meetings and moments of financial precarity, weaving vulnerability and uncertainty into the fabric of becoming.
The design house’s ethos is now inseparable from Gormley’s personal awakening. Living on a nine acre Cornish estate with a Georgian house and gardens redesigned by acclaimed landscape gardeners Isabel and Julian Bannerman, Gormley found that nature increasingly influenced her decision to run her business with Nature at its heart. Six months into the world, her book has become a manifesto for those already questioning old stories and imagining something fundamentally different.
Imagery courtesy of House of Hackney (@houseofhackney).
