TWO friends who wanted to create a beautiful first home without breaking the bank ended up turning it into an online interiors company worth £2million.

Diana Greenhalgh and Laura Simpson created My Bespoke Room, a Bournemouth-based online interior design service which starts at £95 per room.

The pair, both 37-year-old mothers-of-two, started working together at L’Oréal in 2004 before separately working for brands including Apple, Giorgio Armani, Stella McCartney and Liz Earle.

Laura Simpson said: “In 2013, I was going through the pains of buying and renovating my first home and was struck by how inaccessible and costly the interior design industry was.

“I tuned to Pinterest for inspiration, but quickly became frustrated because I couldn’t find the items I saw and loved so much in the photos.

“I reached out to Diana who had recently gone through the same frustrations of renovating her own home, and we started researching the industry. Sensing a gap in the market for an easy, convenient and professional online service, the idea of My Bespoke Room was born.”

Diana said: “We found a huge gap between having to do it all yourself and then hoping for the best, and hiring a professional, which was generally perceived for high net-worth individuals. So we started doing projects for friends and family to work out how we could build out our idea using technology.”

The pair raised £18,000 from friends and family to launch My Bespoke Room in 2014.

Diana said: “At the time we both had very young children and our set up was working from each other’s homes, literally from the kitchen table. We managed to work around our family lives and were often working well into the early hours.”

For the first three years, the pair did everything themselves, reaching the Top 10 Interior Designers rating on online interior design community Houzz UK.

They went on to hire professional and qualified designers.

Diana said: “Late n 2016 we had a four-times repeat customer who was a tech entrepreneur and a big fan of our service. She asked to meet with us and was super impressed with what we’d built on such a small budget – and encouraged us to go out and raise money to be able to grow and scale, and since has become a good friend and mentor.“We started to work on our pitch to be able to go out and meet angel investors.”

My Bespoke Room now has 30 designers who work in its Christchurch Road office, London and across the UK, and it ranks as the number one interior designer on Houzz UK.