Janine Tijou, Founding Director

Since founding the company in 1999, Janine has led Designhive to sustained success and growth across an incredible array of domestic and international projects.

 

A former 'Surrey Entrepreneur of the Year', Janine is passionate about helping clients communicate their visions and utilises her extensive experience in marketing to articulate client briefs and work out the most effective way to help tell their story. Prior to founding Designhive she worked as a marketing consultant providing specialist advice to senior teams within blue chip client organisations including BT, Coca-Cola, Guinness, HP and Mansell Construction.

 

Janine also conceived and wrote the highly successful RIBA-accredited CPD The Verifiable Planning Process which she has presented to over 100 companies in the 6 years since its inception and she continues to present to various London Boroughs to promote industry standard best practice. More recently she has written a follow-up CPD entitled Creative Briefing and Storytelling. She welcomes opportunities to speak on the subject of effective visual communication and is a keynote speaker at various industry events including RUDI and Modelling World 2011, Urban Design Group, Reading University (to architecture and engineering masters students) and Imagina, the European 3D simulation and visualisation event.

 

Associations with architecture are very much in Janine's blood as she is a direct descendent of Jean Tijou, the 17th century French master ironworker, personally commissioned by Sir Christopher Wren to create the ornate screens and grilles for St Paul’s Cathedral. A triumverate of architectural excellence was completed by the English wood sculptor Grinling Gibbons who worked closely with both Tijou and Wren at the time. Further evidence of Tijou's surviving works can still be seen at Hampton Court Palace and also at the great country house estates of Chatsworth, Burghley and Easton Neston.

 

Jean Tijou was a French artist in metal of whom Wren had heard and to engage whom, he went over to Paris himself. The ironwork gates and grilles in the Quire, the railing of the Geometrical Staircase of the West Gallery, and of the four Galleries in the Dome, are the monuments of his exquisite genius."

W.M. Sinclair, 'Memorials of St Paul's Cathedral'