I remember when I first read the Patagonia book "Let my people go surfing". It must have been almost 10 years ago. I was at the beginnings of my start-up journey. It was... awakening. To read the story of another startup that grew to be such a success, where the aim was not success.

Where they seemed to succeed by doing the best they could for their people. And for the planet. They just continued making the right and moral choices each time, and kept faith.

A particular facet of their style, encapsulated in the title was that when the surf was good, they let their staff go surfing. Allowing them the freedom to make the most of the conditions, make the most of their lives, trusting that the work would get done later. They understood that keeping peoples cups full was incredibly important.

I learned recently that Spotify have a program where they hire ghost artists to record tracks that sound the same as existing music on their popular playlists. They then buy the rights to the master copies, and quietly insert them in curated playlists. This saves Spotify a huge amount on musician royalties (these ghost tracks can achieve millions of streams and out-perform Grammy award winning artists), and according to internal communications at Spotify, they believe that listeners "won't know the difference". If you're interested more in the story you can search for the article in Harpers by Liz Pelly or for the newsletters written by Ted Gioia on Sub stack.

This really disturbed me when I read it, and as well as prompting a changing of my listening habits on Spotify (goodbye recommended playlists, and hello to full albums again), it made me start to think about the nature of art, creativity, and underneath that; soul…

Welcome to our Open House Open Letters.

We originally started with writing newsletters to the team, as a way to keep everyone in the loop as well as document our own journey with Open House.

And now we’ve decided to open up our newsletters to the community, so that you can follow along the journey with us.

It's 2025.

Wow. What a journey so far.

I'm so glad we took a couple of weeks off over the holidays. I really needed it. I think a lot of people did. I really appreciated the time to deeply rest, switch off, and renew.

It's really incredible to think back to where we were 12 months ago. To see how far we've come…

Dear Open House Team,

We would love for you to join us and celebrate the festive season! Thursday 19th December from 6.30pm at Open House, join us for dinner, drinks and a dance to live music. We hope you can celebrate with us! Please let us know if you can make it via the following link and inform us of any dietary requirements. 

We can't wait to celebrate with our team and raise a glass to our first year of creating magic together!

With gratitude,

Open House

Theo here. I’ve been asked to write something about myself as I’m about to go to university.

I’m off to study History and Politics at Warwick, which I’m genuinely looking forward to. I’ve always been into history, and got more into politics in the last two (eventful) years. I appreciate that lots of people find both boring, so I won’t bang on about the Crimean War or neoliberalism...

There is a book in the Open House Library called 'How Will You Measure Your Life?' by Clayton Christensen.

I first read that book many years ago, when it was recommended to me by Andre, and it's a question that has stuck with both of us ever since. How will we measure our lives? What is the metric that we would choose to determine a 'successful' life lived? What truly fulfills us, and gives us purpose?

In physics, spacetime (also known as the space-time continuum) is a mathematical model that fuses the 3-dimensions of space and the 1 dimension of time into a single 4-dimensional continuum. It allows for the observation that time can pass differently for an object depending on the object’s velocity relative to the observer.

I guess this may be why the last 6 months have been both a rapid blur and an eternity for me at the same time...

Hey folks,

Welcome to August, welcome to Leo season, welcome to Summer.

As of 14th August, the Daily Kitchen cafe will have been open for 6 months, which feels like a pretty big milestone. The studio upstairs will have been open for 7 months, and the regulars who attend the classes are forming a community...