I Was in the Wrong Job for Seventeen Years! Reno Rules' Julia Green

If you’ve ever stood in your living room and felt nothing, this one’s for you. Stylist, author and TV reno judge Julia Green joins Editor Elle Lovelock to talk about building a home that feels like an autobiography, not a catalogue spread. She went from “peddling drugs” (pharmaceuticals) for 17 years in a job she hated to styling shoots, closing her beloved store and now judging My Reno Rules, all while raising a family and painting every available surface in colour. Julia is funny and unfiltered about the gap between how interiors look on TV and how they actually feel to live in. She talks about growing up with a mum who let her paint her bedroom walls on a whim, decking out her first flat with no money but a lot of ingenuity, and why she’ll always choose “considered chaos” over safe beige. There’s career whiplash, there’s grief for past chapters, and there’s the quiet joy of realising your house doesn’t have to be perfect to feel like home, it just has to feel like you. Moments you’ll hear Julia deadpanning that she used to “peddle drugs” (legally) in pharma for nearly two decades, hating every minute, before a stranger buying her couch told her she was in the wrong job and handed her a Vogue photographer’s business card. The chaos‑magic timing of going into labour four hours after that conversation and only circling back to the card at the end of maternity leave, a week before she was meant to return to corporate life. The “I’ve got a new job, I’m a stylist tomor