Today I am turning the lens inward. This piece is about myself, the person behind WITH J C M L. In common terminology I am called a consultant or stylist, though I prefer the term Space Curator. My practice embodies more than a simple consultation. I help others find a heightened sense of ease within their environmental spaces, supporting their natural rhythm to move toward alignment.

My journey began in fashion, where I discovered my passion for personalised service and my ability to guide others. Transitioning into interiors and space curation felt like an organic breath, allowing me to blend two disciplines I love. Bridging the gap between personal style and physical space has been a source of joy and happiness for me.

What lights me up most about this work is helping clients uncover their inner truths and find comfort in their surroundings. It is a privilege to facilitate this growth, watching them discover new aspects of themselves and their relationship with their environment. This work is precious to me and I am humbled by the opportunity to make a positive impact.

Sustainable Creative Practice

As someone who values sustainability, my creative practice is simple yet effective. I work from anywhere using a humble desk space and my trusty laptop, notepad, favourite ink pen and a reliable internet connection. This setup allows me to focus on the work at hand, unencumbered by distractions.

When I am feeling overwhelmed or carrying too many projects simultaneously, I have learned to slow down and pace myself. As a naturally peaceful Projector, I prioritise my energy and flow through tasks methodically. Through my work, I aim to meet the need for individuals to find clarity and alignment in their lives.

In a world that increasingly values individuality, it is more important than ever to prioritise self awareness and intention. By helping clients create grounded, aligned spaces, I am not only improving their physical environment but also supporting their emotional and mental wellbeing.

My physical environment profoundly impacts my creative output. I am attuned to natural light, spatial energies and the sensory texture of a space. This intuitive awareness guides my design decisions, ensuring that every element serves both the individual and their environment. Most days I work from a desk space kept intentionally simple. A laptop, notepad, favourite ink pen and a warm cup of tea. Less clutter means more room for clarity. When I am not using digital media, I switch back to analogue, sketching, writing and exploring different formats of tactile play in creativity and art.

Practices That Feed My Work

Breathing and meditation, yoga, dance, song, movement, writing and nature walks feed my creative discipline. As a Projector, I am drawn to authentic conversations and meaningful connections with others. These practices nourish my work, allowing me to approach each client journey with compassion and understanding.

Human Design

As a Splenic Projector, Human Design wisdom informs my approach, allowing me to tailor my guidance to each individual energy type and needs. By embracing their natural gifts and tendencies, I help others find clarity, purpose and fulfilment in their lives, both within themselves and in their physical spaces.

Since I was young I was in tune with energetic frequencies, yet I was unequipped with the tools or language to express these gifts. Highly sensitive and intuitive as an empath, I pick up on other people’s frequencies around me, allowing me to experience moments of profound emotional depth. Once provided the knowledge of this through Human Design, I understood my need for emotional boundaries and clarity, not only within myself but when relating to others, knowing when to tune in and when not to. Having that knowing and ability allowed me the space to trust my intuition and understand what is best influencing my wellbeing.

A Lasting Impact

I hope that those who encounter my work will feel seen, heard and guided toward their highest potential. My intention is to empower individuals to create spaces that nurture their soul, allowing them to live more authentically and joyfully. By helping others find ease and alignment, I am not only improving their physical environment but also contributing, one space at a time, to something more grounded.

WITH J C M L is still young and born from the idea that life, work and home work best when synchronised with flow. This is only the beginning.

Photos and Designs belong to Jade Leong.

To find more of Jade’s work:

Here https://withjcml.com/

Or follow on withjcml

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Flow in space. Flow in energy. Flow in life.

Work with me: If you are curious about what your energy type asks of your interiors, this is the work. We begin with your chart, and we will go from there. Sessions Delivered Globally.

When you feel the pull toward something deeper, this is where that begins. Let’s create sanctuary together.

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I first met Kate when I was working in jewellery. What struck me immediately was a seriousness around the craft, paired with a sharp, dry wit that made her genuinely fun to be around. She was easy to get along with, but she was never frivolous about the work. You could see it in how she moved at the bench, in the way she looked at a piece before she touched it. Detail was not a discipline for her, it was a language.

Watching her grow into her own as a business owner has been one of those quietly inspiring things to witness. Through the highs and the slower seasons, she has established herself as one of Melbourne’s foremost independent jewellers, and her personal work, with its cool art deco Mexicali influence, earns compliments every single time I wear it.

Where it began

Her path into jewellery was not a straight line. A teacher noticed a drawing in a fifth form graphics class and suggested she get it made, and the jeweller invited her in to make it herself, in brass, and in that moment something shifted in her that she has been following ever since. She traced that feeling across two degrees, across years of on the job learning in other studios, staying five years in one position and another five in the next, before venturing out on her own after her daughter arrived. A decade of building quietly alongside employment, and then finally the full focus of her own business.

There is a particular quality to watching someone work who is exactly where they are supposed to be, a stillness beneath the motion and a sense that the hands know something the mind does not need to explain.

The work and what it holds

What Kate loves most is the sentimental weight of what she makes. The meaning behind each piece is different, she says, but it always feels special, important, and quite a privilege to deliver these treasures to clients. She hopes people feel seen when they wear her work, feel connected to something that carries their particular story, something that transcends trends and is entirely, unmistakably theirs. It is a wearable artform, and that appeals to both her practical and her arty sides in equal measure.

Her inspiration moves between the deeply personal and the deeply architectural. For custom work it is usually the client, their preferences and their story, held alongside her own knowledge of what will actually translate into metal and stone. For her ranges and one off pieces, it is often structure and geometry that lead her, the Mexicali range drawing from Frank Lloyd Wright and ancient Mayan structures in a way that rewards concentration and asks the maker to trust the system they have built.

The studio and its rhythm

Her studio sits inside the Century Building on Swanston Street, a heritage listed art modern building that has long been a hub for jewellers and related trades. It is a beautiful, serious place, and it suits her completely. She cannot work from home, she will tell you plainly, because the bench is where the focus actually lives, where the particular quality of attention her work demands becomes available to her. Home is reserved for admin and photography, and for keeping some meaningful separation between work and family life.

Her ideal rhythm is a good run of commission work followed by a lull, a quieter stretch where the ideas that have been accumulating during all the other making can finally surface and get the attention they deserve. She is honest about the fact that this balance is rarely clean, that commission work and personal work are constantly competing for space, and that growing the business without sacrificing the handmade craft is an ongoing negotiation. The practice itself, even after nearly twenty years, remains an ongoing learning.

The energy beneath it all

Kate is a Generator, and the more I understand that energy type, the more I see it written through everything she has built. Generators are the builders of the world, here to do work they love, and when they find it they become almost unstoppable. They do not initiate from nothing but rather come alive when something calls out something within them, when a brief, a material, an idea ignites that deep gut recognition that says yes, this is the thing. Her entire path reads this way, each step a response and each yes leading naturally and inevitably to the next.

Her variable points to Valleys as her ideal environment, low and sheltered and enclosed, the kind of spaces where sound and detail are absorbed and the world is held at a particular remove. The Century Building, with its thick walls and its history layered into every corridor and its embedded community of makers, is precisely that kind of place, and it is no accident that she found her way there.

What Kate makes lasts, not simply because of how it is constructed, though the construction is meticulous, but because it carries the deep satisfaction of someone who found their work and said yes to it completely.

Photos and Designs belong to Kate Higgins.

To find more of Kate’s work:

Here https://elispeaks.com.au/

Or follow on elispeaksjewellery.

Leave a like or comment below to let me know if you enjoyed this piece

Flow in space. Flow in energy. Flow in life.

Work with me: If you are curious about what your energy type asks of your interiors, this is the work. We begin with your chart, and we will go from there. Sessions Delivered Globally.

When you feel the pull toward something deeper, this is where that begins. Let’s create sanctuary together.

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Some people arrive already formed. Henry was like that. I met him at a different time, when I was deep in the fashion world, moving fast, constantly forward, and he moved like the opposite of all of that. Quiet, unhurried, with a stillness about him that made you curious rather than comfortable. We worked together, and then stayed connected in the way that only happens when something is real. I have loved watching him grow, watching him come into himself over the years, though grow is almost the wrong word. He arrived knowing exactly who he was. What I have really watched is the world slowly catch up to him.

Where It Began

He is an independent brand and graphic designer. Sometimes creativity is inherited, something carried in the blood, and that was very much the case here. His father was naturally very artistic, and for him that pull came early. By twelve going on thirteen, he was already building websites and experimenting with Photoshop, drawn instinctively toward problem solving and deciphering the visual language of things. That instinct has never left him. It is worth pausing on that timeline for a moment. Children today often arrive at digital fluency by the age of seven or eight, guided by touchscreens and intuitive interfaces from their earliest years. To be navigating web architecture and design software at that age, back then, was something else entirely. A genuine curiosity pulling a young person toward a future they could not yet name. What he loves most is the tailoring of it, meeting each client in their specific world and shaping something that genuinely fits. There is a particular kind of intelligence in that, one that is less about technical mastery and more about listening, reading what a person or a business is quietly trying to become.

The Work

His practice reflects who he is at his core. Working predominantly in professional services and online spaces, he moves lightly through the world, keeping his footprint small and printing to a minimum where he can. What drives his decisions is not trend or external approval but something quieter and more internal. He leads with his gut. As a Manifestor, one of the rarest energy types in Human Design, making up only nine percent of the population, he is wired to initiate, to act on instinct, and to bring things into being without waiting for permission or consensus. He puts it simply: “I am a huge believer in energy and manifestation. If I feel that something is affecting my energy, whether positively or negatively, I step back and reflect on what may be influencing it.” It is the kind of self-awareness that cannot be taught. You either trust yourself or you do not. He always has. Individuality and creative expression sit at the heart of what he makes, crafting visual narratives and purposeful brand outcomes through a genuinely contemporary lens. His process is never about imposing a vision. It is about uncovering one, drawing out what was already present and giving it the form it was always asking for.

How He Moves

Outside of the studio, he moves toward beauty and atmosphere. New cafes, new cities, new sensory worlds. A recent trip to Bangkok left a lasting impression, particularly the branding and signage woven through its thriving restaurant scene, a visual richness he felt was quietly underappreciated. Travel for him is never tourism. It is research of the most personal kind, a way of filing away texture and visual language that surfaces later in the work, often without him realising the connection until it is already made. Touch is his primary cognition, the way he reaches out and reads the world before his mind catches up. He is exquisitely sensitive to atmosphere, picking up on what others move through without noticing. The right space fuels him. The wrong one costs him something. He puts it plainly: "It's important to surround yourself with energy, daylight and stimuli, senses of smell, taste, sound." After back to back meetings at home since ten in the morning, he finds his reset not in more stillness but in the particular hum of a local cafe, a small ritual that restores him without demanding anything in return.

Where He Restores

He is, by his own admission, an introvert. His Human Design carries the Hermit line, and it shows in the most beautiful way. Solitude is not something he merely tolerates; it is where he does his best thinking, where his gifts come into focus. After back to back meetings, he finds his reset not in social noise but in the quiet hum of a local cafe, a small ritual that restores him without demanding anything in return. His non-negotiables speak to that same simplicity: his hard drive, his perfume, his charging cables. Everything needed, nothing excessive. The edit always reveals the person.

That is the through line with him. He has always edited well, in work and in life, keeping only what holds meaning, leading with instinct, creating with intention. He is one of those rare people who arrive knowing themselves, fully and without apology, and who build a life and a practice that reflects that from the very beginning. The rest of us are just lucky enough to witness it.

Photos and Designs belong to Henry Rodriguez.

To find more of Henry’s work:

Here henryro.com

Or follow on henry.ro

Leave a like or comment below to let me know if you enjoyed this piece

Flow in space. Flow in energy. Flow in life.

Work with me: If you are curious about what your energy type asks of your interiors, this is the work. We begin with your chart, and we will go from there. Sessions Delivered Globally.

When you feel the pull toward something deeper, this is where that begins. Let’s create sanctuary together.

Instagram @withjcml · Website withjcml.com

Soul Led Practice · Designed to your Wiring · Slow Interiors

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There are people whose presence quietly rearranges something in the room, not through volume or performance, but through a quality of attention that is genuinely rare. Artist and educator, Michèle grew up at the edge where Switzerland meets Germany, shaped by years living on Santorini and now rooted in Australia, carries that quality into everything she touches. I had the privilege of being one of her students, and what struck me was how completely her way of teaching mirrored the way I had always hoped to learn: holistically, without rigidity, with full permission to follow curiosity wherever it led. She was living proof that this way of working was not only possible but worth protecting. Her work resists easy categorisation, and she would have it no other way.

Curiosity as the Engine

Michèle describes herself as someone who works between things: between art and design, between languages, between disciplines. For those familiar with energy types, she is a Manifesting Generator, and how she moves through life reflects that wiring precisely. Manifesting Generators are not built for a single lane. They are designed to respond, to light up across multiple channels, to find the through line between seemingly unrelated things and make something vital from it. Her refusal to be boxed into one category is not indecision. It is her nature working exactly as it should.

Her path has been a slow reveal rather than a planned trajectory. She draws on Kierkegaard’s observation that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards. Each country, each language, each unexpected turn, including ten years in Greece, guiding tourists through the summers, painting through the winters, that proved excellent training for the classroom, has quietly prepared her for what came next, even when she could not yet see the shape of it.

Studio and Classroom

The balance between studio practice and teaching is something Michèle speaks about with rare honesty. In the studio, work is deeply introverted: an entire day can disappear following an idea wherever it wants to go. The classroom brings an entirely different energy, full of questions from unexpected directions. She says she often only becomes aware of the question itself through the conversation. The studio gives her space to explore. The classroom gives her clarity. She needs both.

Her mornings begin at five. Anyone who has watched light settle slowly over the Ranges or lie flat across still harbour water will understand this hour as its own kind of gift. She is honest about sustainability: not overbooking, protecting the weekends, checking in regularly on how much of the work is genuinely hers. The signs are unmistakable in either direction. When she wakes with ease, the day tends to follow.

Designing for Her Nature

When I sit with someone’s energy type before I ever sit with a brief, the space begins to reveal itself. For Michèle, the first and most non-negotiable consideration is elevation. Her environment is mountains, and this is not a metaphor. The body needs to feel above things, with visual breadth and air that moves. A high window, a lofted studio, a room that opens toward a ridge: these are not aspirational extras but functional requirements. Pair that with cool ambient temperature, stone or tile that holds the cold, natural cross-ventilation, and you begin to have a space the nervous system can actually settle into.

Her cognition works through feeling and atmosphere, which means texture, scent and layered light do the work that logic cannot. Raw linen, worn timber, unpolished stone. Nothing synthetic, nothing sealed. A Manifesting Generator needs genuine room to move, so the floor plan stays open, the furniture stays mobile, and multiple work zones exist without competing: one for making, one for teaching, one for thinking quietly alone. Her profile carries a real duality too, deeply relational on one hand, and on the other, someone who needs a private elevated perch to observe from. A window seat positioned just apart from everything else. Not distance but perspective. And because her authority is emotional and cannot be rushed, the space must always offer somewhere to simply look out and wait.

The Space Between Perfection and Presence

Something Michèle is actively releasing is perfectionism. The more she works, the more she becomes convinced that process holds more value than outcome. There is a legend about craftspeople who would intentionally introduce small imperfections into their work, a quiet insistence that human hands had been there, thinking and making choices. She holds the same belief. The wobble, the hesitation, the mark that shows a human was present: these are not flaws. They are the entire point. This extends into the spaces where learning happens. Moving away from the old model of teacher at the front and students in rows is not about tearing down the room but changing the arrangement, which is really about changing the relationship. Space shapes behaviour. The way a room is configured tells people how much of themselves they are permitted to bring.

What She Hopes Stays

For her students, she wants them to leave trusting their own taste and being courageous about it. Not believing their taste is the only taste, but not letting anyone else’s opinion shake their conviction either. For those who encounter her art, she hopes they feel it before they understand it, not as decoration but as something that genuinely stirs. Art should not simply occupy a wall. It should occupy you.

Michèle offered a quietly profound thought during a period of recovery: drawing, she realised, requires having a life first. You must experience things before you can make things. The recipe is simple: have a life, let yourself be distracted by a walk, a book, or the clouds, then start working, with or without inspiration. She echoes Picasso: inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. You have to be there, steady and present, when it does. Nothing is wasted, nothing separate. It is all the same act of paying attention, of trusting that a life lived with genuine openness will reveal itself, slowly and beautifully, in time.

Photos and Artwork belong to Michèle Meister.

To find more of Michèle's work:

Here https://www.michelemeisteratelier.com/

Or follow on instagram.

Leave a like or comment below to let me know if you enjoyed this.

Flow in space. Flow in energy. Flow in life.

Work with me: If you are curious about what your energy type asks of your interiors, this is the work. We begin with your chart, and we will go from there. Sessions Delivered Globally.

When you feel the pull toward something deeper, this is where that begins. Let’s create sanctuary together.

Instagram @withjcml · Website withjcml.com

Soul Led Practice · Designed to your Wiring · Slow Interiors

I N S I G H T S · WITH J C M L is a reader-supported space. Subscribe to receive biweekly wisdom on designing for your energy type and creating a home that genuinely holds you.

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