Mydeco is helping to spawn a new nation of designers, according to the start-up's CEO, David Kelly. The home-design website is part online store, part social community. Users not only choose from a catalogue of home furnishings, from partner retailers such as John Lewis, Habitat and Ikea, but they design and plan their own rooms using Mydeco's 3D software and compare and rate fellow users' efforts. They can even plan rooms for others, taking a commission from any furnishings sold.

"There is a powerful relationship between an individual and where they spend their time," says Kelly. "Just being a source of product is not really leveraging that relationship. We want to be the first destination that people think about when they are designing or shopping for their home," he adds.

Kelly knows his way around a technology start-up. The former operations director at eBay, Amazon and Lastminute.com has experience in online retail, but that doesn't mean he's not open to new ideas. The six-month "beta" public testing period for the site is now over and Kelly reckons the contributions from users have been invaluable: "We've made improvements. One part of the beta was proving the model—are we driving enough conversion from visitors to purchasers, are we engaging people in the site?"

Kelly has the help of an experienced board, which includes executive chairman Brent Hoberman (who started Lastminute.com), top designers Philippe Starck and Sir Terence Conran, and Martha Lane Fox. He says the original idea was Hoberman's, back in 1999.

Although Hoberman's wife was a designer, the couple couldn't agree on how any of their rooms should look. "That's how we started trying to build the model," says Kelly. And beta testing has proved the potential: "I meet more and more people getting into interior design. I think it's a huge market."