About
the
founder

Liz Calder – or Biddis, as she was affectionately nicknamed by her younger brother when they were kids – is the founder of Biddis Lifestyle Design.

Her love for brightly coloured clothes – not forgetting her signature yellow shoes – and a lifelong aversion to the colour black, means she’s tended to stand out. She hasn’t always fitted the mould, but that’s fine by her. Life is too short to squeeze yourself into a mould that doesn’t feel right. And she believes the same is true for design. She loves to empower independent businesses by helping them embrace what makes them different and stand out from the crowd. She takes this ethos into her design work. With nearly twenty years of agency experience, she wants to share her toolkit of skills to ensure their success.

The story doesn’t start there. Back in her teens, while working in a bar, she discovered she had a knack for intuiting what felt wrong or right about spaces. With a few simple changes that included reconfiguring tables and reorganising entry and exit signs, she quickly made the place more functional. With the encouraging nods and smiles of customers and staff alike, she realised she might want to take this knack of hers in a more professional direction. 

However, not surprisingly, her love for design went back further than that. As a child, she put the crew of Blue Peter to shame, building entire miniature villages out of cereal boxes, and was rarely seen without a pencil, rubber and ruler in her hand.

She began to upgrade her skills when she started to take an avid interest in the en-suite bathrooms her dad was building at her parents’ hotel.  Fascinated by grouting and fastening, she was always around to help her dad after school, on hand with the toolbox and picking up the trade fast. She realises it was probably then that she got her first taste for improving people’s lives, by creating environments they would love spending time in.