HearthBy Marlies Hobbs

Sanctuary within.
Sanctuary at home.

Scroll

A home at dusk, looking out over the hinterland

One of my own builds — Sunshine Coast hinterland

A place to return to

Have you ever walked into a beautiful room and still felt unsettled?

Most of us have. A room can be faultlessly designed and still ask something of the nervous system — to stay alert, to keep performing, to hold on a little longer. Another room asks nothing at all, except that you sit down.

HEARTH works in that gap: the distance between how a space looks and how it lands. It is one practice rather than a list of services — interiors and the Five Elements, nature and the body, energy and presence, and the quieter work of deciding what the next chapter should feel like. All of it rests on a single belief: our inner and outer environments continually shape one another.

The name

Heart+Earth

Hearth

Not where the word comes from — where the brand comes from. The two are a symbolic reading rather than an etymology, and they hold the whole practice between them.

hearthnoun

The floor of a fireplace, and the space in front of it. Traditionally the heart of the home — the place around the fire where people gathered for warmth, nourishment, safety and connection. It still carries all of that: belonging, grounding, restoration, life force.

Heart: Healing, energy, intuition and emotional wellbeing. Connection, presence, and the work with horses.
Earth: Home and interiors, Feng Shui and the Five Elements. Nature, materials, grounding, and the land this work is done on.

Hearth is where the two meet.

The four questions

Everything here begins with a question, not a service.

Space

Interiors · Five Elements · Feng Shui

How does this environment support the life actually being lived in it?

Body

Nature · scent · touch · horses

What happens when the body is finally given enough space to soften and listen?

Energy

Reiki · intention · presence

What is being held here, and what is ready to be released or restored?

Vision

Life review · reframing · direction

Who are you becoming, and what should the next chapter feel like?

Through a Five Element lens

White is Metal. But is Metal always yin?

The Five Elements are not five decorating styles, and colour is only one way an element speaks. Material, form, scale, texture, finish, light and proportion all shape how a room is read — and, more importantly, how it is felt.

This is the main bathroom from one of my own builds. Almost everything in it belongs to Metal. It is not a soft room, and it was never meant to be.

Bathroom with charcoal stone floor, timber vanity and marble

The reading

Metal: Dominant. White walls, marble, a full-width mirror, black tapware, precise detailing. Brilliant contrast and sharp geometry read as a distinctly yang Metal — not a yin one.
Earth: Grounding. Large-format charcoal stone underfoot, laid wide and calm. It holds the room down while the walls stay light.
Wood: Softening. The timber vanity, and the bush pressed against the glass. Warmth and upward growth against all that hard surface.
Water: Present. Not the plumbing — the depth of the dark floor, the reflective glass, the way light moves across a wet surface.
Fire: Restrained, deliberately. Warmth arrives through timber and daylight rather than through colour.

Clear, ordered and quietly luxurious — cool in structure, warmed just enough by timber and daylight to stay habitable rather than clinical.

The element tells us the energetic family. Yin and yang tell us how that energy is expressed.

Working together

Every engagement begins in the same place: with what you are noticing. A home that no longer fits. A season that has quietly ended. A room you avoid without quite knowing why.

From there the work takes the shape it needs — a home read through the Five Elements, time in nature and with horses, restorative sessions, or a longer conversation about direction. Experience first. Modality second.

Nothing here is a package. Every part of it is shaped around one person, to meet you where you are — a place to be heard, supported and guided toward the person you are becoming.

Feng Shui-led interior designHome Harmony — Five Element review Concept, materials & selectionsRooms & refreshes Equine Assisted WellbeingAromaTouch ReikiEquine Assisted Reiki Nervous system & life sessionsGuided practices

See how we might work together

In their words

What people say afterwards

Two sides of the same practice — the home and the person — and the builders, agents and developers who have watched the work up close. None of them had any reason to be generous.

“

Your ability to listen to our needs and translate them into a functional workspace has been extremely satisfying… Your exceptional organisational skills and management of quotes and trade meetings have significantly lightened my load.

Chrystal AndrewsWorkspace project

“

I recently received an AromaTouch with Marlies and it was such an amazing experience. Marlies is so caring and nurturing — I felt incredibly balanced in my body, mind and soul afterwards.

Natasha OakmandōTERRA Gold Leader

“

She had a vision of what she was wanting to achieve with the build and the final outcome was perfect… Marlies’ excellent eye for colour and creative modern ideas resulted in an outstanding and HIA award winning new home.

Tracey GrantBrendan Grant Homes

“

In my business one of the core fundamentals for a successful sale is the presentation and styling of a home. Marlies nailed it every single time.

Karl Latham · Director of SalesElite Real Estate Services

“

Everything from the tweaks to the original plans to the colour selections, fixtures, fittings and landscaping all made a huge difference… you are a genuine asset to any project no matter how big or small.

Ben Johnston · DirectorProperty Shop

“

The end result was stunning. The quick sales were a testament to the finished project.

Andrew Thomas · Managing DirectorDixon Homes

The woman behind Hearth

A non-linear route to a very particular kind of attention.

Law. Business. Thirteen of my own builds and three renovations, with client projects alongside. Overextension, and a slow recovery. Horses, nature and a home that was finally allowed to hold me rather than perform. None of it was a plan. All of it turned out to be the training.

Read the longer story

Work with me

There is no standard version of this.

Every part of this work is shaped around one person. Not a package and not a protocol — a considered response to where you actually are on the day we begin.

You should expect to be listened to properly. To be met without being managed. To feel held rather than processed, and to leave with something more useful than you arrived with: clarity, ease, direction, or simply the sense that someone was paying close attention.

That is the whole intention — a place to be heard, supported and guided toward the person you are becoming. Your sanctuary, within and at home.

Living and dining opening to a pool at dusk

Indoor to outdoor — a completed project

Space

The home you live in

Interiors led by how a room is meant to feel, then resolved with the practical detail that makes it actually happen. Homes mostly — and workspaces, where the same thinking applies to how a day is spent.

Feng Shui-led interior design: Your home read as a whole — its light, proportion, materials and the way you genuinely move through it — then translated into decisions you can make. Concept direction, space planning, colour and finishes, lighting, window treatments, furniture and styling. The Five Elements and Feng Shui inform every choice rather than dictating it.
Home Harmony — a Five Element review: For a home that looks right and still feels wrong. A room-by-room reading of the elemental balance: what is dominant, what is missing, and what the space is quietly asking of your nervous system. You receive a clear, unhurried sense of what to change first — and what to leave alone.
Concept, materials and selections: Thirteen builds and three renovations of my own homes — concept design through to the final finish, and then living in the result — alongside project work for clients. That distinction matters. I have been the client. I have made the thousands of small decisions, paid for the wrong ones, and watched what happens to a plan when it meets a site. Materials, fittings, fixtures and finishes; furnishing and styling schedules; and the practical, respectful work of holding a brief steady alongside a builder, cabinetmaker, tiler or electrician — including the unglamorous part: quotes, schedules and trade meetings, kept off your desk. One of those homes went on to win an HIA award. If you are building or renovating, this is where a beautiful idea either survives or quietly disappears.
Rooms and refreshes: Not every project needs to be a whole house. A single room, a furnishing and styling plan, or a colour and finishes direction you can carry out yourself, at your own pace.

Selected projects

Kitchen with black joinery and marble splashback

Bathroom with charcoal stone and timber vanity

Main bedroom with a fluted timber bedhead

From my own builds and from client projects. Concept, selections and finishes throughout. Full project detail on request.

Body

Enough space to soften

Slow, sensory work. Nothing is required of you except that you arrive.

Equine Assisted Wellbeing: Ground-based time with horses — no riding. Horses respond to what is actually happening rather than to what we are presenting, which makes them unusually honest company. Often the work is simply standing near one until something in you stops holding on. Endorsed Practitioner in Equine Facilitated Learning
AromaTouch: A slow, structured sequence of essential oils applied along the back and feet. Scent reaches us before language does, and this is an invitation for the body to drop below thinking. You choose the oils, and you can decline any of it at any point. dōTERRA AromaTouch Technique

Energy

Held, quietly

Presence and attention, offered without explanation unless you would like one.

Reiki: Light touch, or hands held just above the body, in a quiet room for an unhurried hour. You stay clothed, you stay in charge, and you can ask for no touch at all. Most people describe it as the first time in a long while that nothing was being asked of them. Usui Reiki, Level Two
Equine Assisted Reiki: Reiki offered outside, with a horse present and free to come and go. The horse usually settles first. Something in the person tends to follow.

Paddocks, arena and stable in late light

Where the equine work happens

Vision

What the next chapter should feel like

For a season that has quietly ended, or one that has not yet taken shape.

$Cockatoos in a grevillea above the valley$

Nervous system & life sessions: A longer conversation, held with care. We begin with what you are noticing — what feels alive, what feels depleted, what still fits and what has been outgrown — and move through reflection, reframing and honest direction. Where it helps, the home you live in becomes part of the enquiry: does it reflect who you have been, or support who you are becoming?
Guided practices: A small set of tools to work through at your own pace: a life visioning practice, a core memories practice for gentle reframing, and a visual manifesto workbook for clarity, gratitude and one honest next step. Used alongside sessions, or entirely on their own.

Two Highland cows — once a photograph on a screen, now in the paddock

How it works

Private, and deliberately small.

I take a limited number of clients at a time. That is a choice, not a constraint — it is what allows the work to be unhurried, and it is the reason it can be shaped so closely around one person.

We begin with a conversation, at no cost and with nothing expected. If it feels right, a short intake form follows so that I understand your home, your health and how you prefer to work before we start.

Every engagement is scoped and quoted for what it actually involves, so there is no standard price list. Ask me about pricing and packages when we speak — it is a straightforward conversation, and I would rather you had a real answer than a range on a page.

Sunshine Coast and surrounds, and in your home where the work belongs there.

These are complementary wellbeing, design and personal-development services. They are not medical, psychological or clinical treatment, they offer no diagnosis or guaranteed outcome, and they do not replace qualified care. You remain in charge throughout — of your home, your body and every decision in between.

Experience first. Modality second.

You do not need to know which of these you want. That is usually the first thing we work out together.

Tell me what you are noticing. We will start there.

Begin a conversation

Prints

The same eye, turned outward.

Every photograph here is one I took myself, usually early or late, usually without planning to. Light on a hill. An animal who let me stand close. The particular hour when a paddock stops being a paddock and becomes something else.

They are available as framed canvas prints, made to order in the size that suits your wall and the frame that suits the room. If a piece of your home needs something to rest on, this is a quiet way to do it — a real place, at a real hour, rather than an image bought by the thousand.

Backlit

Late sun through a mare's mane

Landscape · 3:2

The sun setting over layered ranges and a wide valley — Last Light

The ranges from above, Scenic Rim

Landscape · 3:2

A red Highland cow standing at a pile of hay in low golden light — Supper

Hay, and the low evening sun

Portrait · 3:4

Two white cockatoos in the foreground above a green valley — Two Cockatoos

A valley in the last of the afternoon

Landscape · 3:2

A note on titles

These are working titles. Tell me if you would rather a piece went by another name — most of them already have one in my head.

If there is something of mine you have seen elsewhere and would like on a wall, ask. The gallery here is a shortlist, not the whole archive.

How they are made

Printed on canvas, framed, made to order.

Each print is produced through my trade supplier on canvas and finished in a solid timber frame. Three to choose from — oak, white or black — all of them plain and unfussy, chosen to sit quietly around the image rather than announce themselves. Nothing is held in stock; each one is made once you have decided, which is also why the size and the frame are entirely yours to choose.

Oak Warm and neutral. Sits naturally with the landscapes and the animals, and with timber already in the room.
White Lightest of the three. Lifts the image off a pale wall and suits a gallery hang of several together.
Black The most defined. Holds the darker, higher-contrast images and anchors a print on a busy or richly coloured wall.

Sizes run from A3 up to 120 × 150 cm, portrait or landscape, in any of the three frames. If you are not sure which, send me the wall measurements instead — the right answer is almost always the one that fits the space you are actually looking at, and it is usually larger than people expect.

29.7 × 42 cmA3
42 × 59.4 cmA2
50 × 70 cm19.6 × 27.5 in
60 × 90 cm23.6 × 35.4 in
70 × 100 cm27.5 × 39.3 in
100 × 130 cm39.3 × 51.1 in
120 × 150 cm47.2 × 59 in

Each size runs either way up — portrait or landscape — and the dimensions above are the canvas; the frame adds a little to each edge. Anything squarer or wider than these proportions is sized individually, so ask and I will tell you what suits the image.

Tell me which one, and where it is going.

Prints are quoted individually, because the price depends on the piece, the size and where it has to travel. Send me those few things and I will come back to you with a figure and a timeframe — no obligation, and no follow-up you did not ask for.

In your enquiry, include

The print or prints you would like, by title
Your preferred size for each — or the wall measurements, and I will suggest one
The delivery address, so freight can be quoted properly
The frame you would like — oak, white or black
Anything driving the timing — a birthday, a move, a room being finished

Enquire about a print

Or email hello@marlieshobbs.com.au directly. Quotes are prepared individually and are valid for 30 days. Prints are made to order, so each one is confirmed with you before it goes to production.

About

You are probably not looking for a practitioner. You are looking for a way back to yourself.

That is a harder thing to search for, and it rarely arrives as one tidy problem. It shows up as a house that never quite settles. A capable life that has started to cost too much. A sense that something no longer fits, without yet knowing what comes next.

Scenic Rim

The long way here

I did not set out to do this work.

I trained in law. I built a business from an idea and learned what relentless momentum costs as well as what it returns. I wrote an education handbook, because I believed useful knowledge should be within reach. I co-founded a lending business and led it from the inside — business development, marketing, people and culture — learning what it takes to build a team, a brand and a service that people trust with decisions that matter.

Somewhere in all of that I kept building. Thirteen of my own homes built and three renovated — concept through to the final finish, and then living in each result — with client projects alongside them. Years of standing on sites with builders and tradespeople, making thousands of decisions about materials, fittings and finishes, and paying for the ones I got wrong. It taught me something that would not leave me alone: the rooms people live in are not neutral. They ask things of us. Some rooms restore; some quietly deplete.

So I went and studied it properly — first at TAFE, then again years later. Technical drawing. Design history and theory. The creative process in two and three dimensions. Architectural styles and the movements that produced them, interior decoration and the influences behind it. Not to collect a title, but because I wanted precise language for something I could already feel.

Then came the part that is less easy to put on a page. Achievement and wellbeing are not the same thing, and I learned that the slow way. What brought me back was not a method. It was nature, horses, touch, ritual, beauty, and eventually a home I stopped asking to impress anyone.

HEARTH is not a departure from any of it. It is the part where everything that came before turns out to have been preparation.

What each chapter left behind

Law: Rigour and discernment. Holding complexity without flattening it, and knowing which question to ask first.
Entrepreneurship: Creativity, courage and leadership — and a clear-eyed view of what building something from nothing actually costs.
Education: A conviction that useful knowledge changes lives when it is made accessible and practical rather than mystified.
Co-founding & leadership: Building a company from the inside — business development, marketing, people and culture. What it takes to make a team, a brand and a service that people trust.
Building & interiors: Thirteen of my own builds and three renovations, plus client projects — one an HIA award-winning home: a working knowledge of concept, materials, selections and trades, and the understanding that environments shape daily experience.
Burnout & recovery: The recognition that achievement and wellbeing are not the same thing — and that boundaries, nature and slower forms of restoration are not indulgences.
Return to self: Horses, land, ritual, intuition, and trust in a process that is not linear and does not need to be.

How I work

Experience first. Modality second.

I do not begin with a technique. I begin with what you are noticing — in the room, in the body, in the life — and the work takes the shape that serves it.

Sometimes that is a home read carefully through the Five Elements, translated into decisions you can actually make. Sometimes it is quieter: time outside, time with horses, touch and scent, or a long conversation about what the next chapter should feel like.

The intention I bring to a room and the intention I bring to a person are the same intention. That is the whole practice.

Training

Studied, not collected.

These sit behind the work rather than in front of it. They are here so you can make an informed choice, not because a list of qualifications tells you anything about how a room will feel.

SEALS_HERE

Statement of Attainment, MSF50222 Diploma of Interior Design — Interior Design Institute, 2026 Academic transcript, MSF50213 Diploma of Interior Design and Decoration — TAFE NSW, 2018 Certificate in Feng Shui — IAP Career College, 2026 Equine Assisted Wellbeing Institute Practitioner Certification, 2026 Endorsed Practitioner in Equine Facilitated Learning Usui Reiki Level Two, 2026 First Degree Reiki, 2023 dōTERRA AromaTouch Technique, 2016

Verified by

$International Institute for Complementary Therapists — Member$ Equine Assisted Wellbeing — Endorsed Practitioner

Premier Member of the International Institute for Complementary Therapists.

Transformation can be gentle.

If something here has landed, that is usually the right reason to make contact — not because you have worked out exactly what you need.

Everything I offer is shaped around one person, to meet you where you are: a place to be heard, supported and guided toward your best next chapter.

See how we might work together

Begin a conversation