Create Academy

What Create Academy is

Create Academy is an online video school for home, garden, food and craft skills, taught by well-known names in each field. The home page invites learners to learn from leading designers, makers, gardeners and chefs and then make the ideas their own, and the footer sums up its aim as "Helping you build your creative confidence and live a more fulfilled life." The catalog is split into Home & Interiors, Gardening & Floristry, Food & Nutrition, and Decorative Arts & Craft. Most people join through an annual membership that opens every course, but single courses can also be bought outright. A separate professional program, Create Academy Pro, trains aspiring and working interior designers in the business side of the job. The footer states that Create Academy Ltd. is a UK registered company, and the support page confirms that "all our courses are available internationally" and are taught in English.

The courses and instructors

The appeal is the roster. Interior design courses on the home page include How to Design Your Dream Home with Bunny Williams (35 lessons), Learn to Design Dramatic Interiors with the New York designer Miles Redd (26 lessons), Design Interiors for Entertaining with Amanda Lindroth (24 lessons), Artfully Edited Interiors with Kathryn M. Ireland (23 lessons), The Advanced Guide to Interior Design with Rita Konig (50 lessons), and A Definitive Guide to Decorating with Nina Campbell (40 lessons), her first course, in which she shares more than half a century of experience. Alidad, described as having "more than three decades of experience creating truly timeless, luxurious" interiors, teaches How to Create Timeless Interiors. Michael S. Smith's Learn the Magic of Decorating is listed as coming soon, alongside Designing Experiences with Martin Brudnizki.

The garden side is just as strong on names. The courses page lists The Art of Gardening at Sissinghurst with head gardener Troy Scott Smith, a Naturalistic Garden Design Masterclass with Dan Pearson, Small Garden Design with Butter Wakefield, The Fundamentals of Garden Design with Jo Thompson, The Complete Floristry Masterclass and Advanced Floral Design (20 lessons) with Willow Crossley, an Indoor Gardening Masterclass with James Wong, and Grow Your Own Food with Claire Ratinon. Food courses include The Ultimate Guide to Vegetarian Cooking with Anna Jones, The Building Blocks of Flavour with Thomasina Miers, The Joy of Healthy Eating with Amelia Freer, and An Expert Guide to Enjoying Wine with Helen McGinn. Craft courses cover Annie Sloan's Furniture Painting Masterclass, block printing with Molly Mahon, decorative painting with Tess Newall, lampshade making, weaving, botanical painting, and botanical art in metal.

The instructors page describes its teachers as "some of the world's most celebrated creatives and leading experts working today across food, interiors, decorative arts and horticulture," with short credentials for each: Annie Sloan as an artist, color expert, author and the inventor of Chalk Paint, Sally Storey as a "Leading British lighting expert," and Helen McGinn as an international wine judge and author.

How the lessons work

The support page explains the format: "All of our courses are online," with "no beginning or finish date," and they are "completely self-paced" so learners can stop, start and pause around their own schedule. Each video lesson has downloadable workbook pages beneath it. The membership page counts 1,500+ lessons and 400+ hours across interiors, gardens, food and craft, plus members-only content such as home tours and behind-the-scenes access, and the instructors page puts the library at 1,734 lessons, with "New content added each month."

Viewing is well supported. The iPhone app, available to subscribers, offers downloads for offline watching, saved lessons and a Continue tab, and progress syncs between app and website. Lessons can be cast to a TV with AirPlay or Chromecast, subtitles can be turned on, playback speed runs from 0.5x to 2x, and Picture-in-Picture is supported. The support page notes there is no dedicated smart TV app yet. Learners can rewatch any lesson as often as they like. Create Academy does not issue certificates for its standard courses.

Membership and pricing

The membership page prices the subscription at $24/month billed annually, with $30 shown beside it during a 20% off course launch sale. Members pay upfront for the year on the day they join, and the subscription renews automatically after 12 months. It gives "access to all courses for 12 months from the date of purchase, including those released during that period." All new subscriptions carry a 30 day money back guarantee, and the FAQ adds "a 14-day grace period for refunds on membership renewals." A course bought individually comes with lifetime access and stays available even after a subscription ends. Gift vouchers and discount codes are redeemed at checkout. The membership page invites visitors to "Join over 150,000 creative minds already inside," and the site shows a rating of 4.7/5 on Trustpilot from 491 Create Academy reviews.

Create Academy Pro

CA Pro is a different product: a paid program for people who want to work as interior designers. Its page title reads "Design school teaches you to design a room. CA Pro teaches you to run a studio." It runs for nine months in three terms, "around six hours a month," with term one opening 14 October, term two in January and term three in April. Each term's filmed lessons are released at once with industry templates and resources, every lesson ends in a piece of work ("A budget, a schedule, a drawing, a proposal"), and "Once a month a working designer gives real feedback."

The syllabus has 7 modules and 37 lessons. Joanna Draper, former Head of Interior Design and Operations at Nina Campbell, teaches three business modules covering the design process, how studios make money, how fees are calculated, and FF&E budgets. Audrey Noakes, a design tutor and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, teaches four technical modules on drawing, digital tools, SketchUp from scratch, and the use of AI in design. Each cohort gets its own community chat, and the program includes every studio template, a PRO Certificate of Completion, and "A year of Create Academy, 60+ courses."

The founding cohort is limited to 150 places at $1,200, which the page says is a 25% discount on $1,600. It is "One payment, not a subscription," with a "Full refund available within 30 days of purchase." No experience is required, and the FAQ says roughly half of each cohort is coming into the industry rather than already working in it.

Who it suits

Create Academy suits someone who wants to learn from the designers, gardeners and cooks they already admire: a homeowner planning a renovation, a keen gardener, a home cook, or someone exploring decorative crafts. The annual membership gives the run of the whole library, while a single course suits someone who only wants one teacher. CA Pro is for a different reader, the career changer or junior designer who needs to learn pricing, budgets, client management and SketchUp alongside a job, with monthly feedback from working designers.