Harry Matuszewicz Milne Was Rejected For 550 Design Jobs So He Built Acid House Designs Instead

Creative Boom: Inspiration Experience Harry Matuszewicz-Milne was rejected for 550 design jobs, so he built Acid House Designs instead This Edinburgh-based interior designer applied for hundreds of jobs after graduating and got nowhere. Eventually, he decided his "too bold" portfolio wasn't the problem—it was the brief. Written By: Tom May 2 July 2026 Harry Matuszewicz-Milne spent 10 years as a mental health nurse before retraining as an interior designer. He graduated from UWE Bristol in 2024 with a first-class honours degree and then spent the best part of a year applying for design jobs.

Close to 550 of them, by his own count, including speculative letters, branded coasters and a hand-typed cover letter on custom stationery. Not one of them led to a job. It's a familiar story for a lot of creative graduates, but Harry's response to it is worth paying attention to. Rather than softening his work to fit what employers seemed to want, he built a studio, Acid House Designs, around the very thing he kept getting told was the problem. "The recurring feeling was that my work was too bold, too strange or too much," he recalls.

It's a line that will land uncomfortably for anyone who has sat through a portfolio review and been told to tone it down. For Harry, the rejection became the founding logic of his business rather than a reason to abandon it. The problem with "too bold" The disconnect, he says, began in the final year of his degree. "Throughout my studies, we were all encouraged to push the boundaries and experiment, to discover who we were as designers, finding our own design personality, etc." That encouragement produced exactly the kind of portfolio you'd expect: bold, colourful, uncompromising. What it didn't produce was a job.

He had three interviews out of hundreds of applications. He made a three-hour drive for a graphic design role where the interviewer asked what experience he had, was pointed to a CV that said "none", and ended the conversation there. Another was for an assistant interior design position on minimum wage. He pushed for feedback and was eventually told his designs were too bold. "This was obviously upsetting, but probably more annoying than anything," he says, and that distinction matters. It's not despair driving the next part of the story, it's irritation; the kind that tends to produce decisive action.

He tried rewriting his CV six or seven times, including a deliberately dulled-down version. He made a video CV that took almost a week to produce and never got a reply. He was repeatedly steered towards kitchen and bathroom sales roles as a stepping stone, which he turned down. "The idea was that to get the job I wanted, I'd have to do a job I didn't want, to be able to do another job I didn't want, and then, hopefully, get a job I wanted," as he puts it. "No thanks." Finding proof of concept While the rejections piled up, Harry had already been building the portfolio piece that would define his practice: his own Bristol flat.

Inspired by Manchester's Haçienda nightclub, rave culture, and pop art, he painted exposed beams with hazard chevrons, turned a living room wall into a Super Mario level with cheap decals, and built an industrial bathroom from corrugated metal and reclaimed floorboards. None of it, he's keen to point out, required a serious budget. "The biggest thing this taught me is that good interiors don't necessarily come from massive budgets," he says.

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The article showcases a unique personal journey that emphasizes bold branding strategies, which can inspire brand professionals, though it may not have a widespread impact on the industry as a whole.