Holma is a coliving brand I co-founded for people who work remotely and don't want to do it alone. I designed the brand, the booking product, and the service itself, then ran it in the real world to see what actually held up.
Remote work untethered people from the office but not from the loneliness that comes with it. The existing options were a false choice: cheap accommodation with no community, or organized “digital nomad” retreats priced like holidays.
Neither solved the real problem. Someone who works full-time and travels doesn't want a vacation. They want a place to live and work for a few weeks, with people worth living alongside, at a price that makes sense for a month, not a weekend.
The bet behind Holma: rent large houses in remote, beautiful places, sublet the rooms, and design the whole experience around the people, not the property.
I was a co-founder, so “my role” was everything with a surface, starting with 40+ interviews with remote workers to shape what the brand and product needed to be. Concretely, as the designer I owned:
Name, identity, voice, and the site that had to make strangers trust us enough to move into a house with people they'd never met.
The flow from browsing a destination to picking a room to actually committing.
The sequence of moments from first click to arrival day, including the parts that happen off-screen.
The obvious flow for a booking product is: pick a place, pick a room, pay, done. Frictionless. I deliberately added friction. Before anyone was confirmed, we did a short virtual call with them.
The reasoning: the product wasn't the room, it was the group. One bad fit could sink the experience for ten people. So the “conversion step” everyone optimizes away was, for us, the most important quality gate in the whole service. It protected the one thing that couldn't be refunded: the atmosphere in the house.
Running a house in a remote location needs someone on the ground. Instead of hiring, I designed a role into the product: a participant could become the local organizer and stay rent-free in exchange. It turned our biggest operational cost into a benefit someone actively wanted, and it seeded each house with a person who was invested in the group working.
Both decisions came from the same principle stated on the site: starting from people. Every time there was a trade-off between operational convenience and the quality of the human experience, the experience won. That's the through-line I'd want a reader to take from this project.
Validated demand with paying customers; the operating model didn't scale.
Holma didn't continue in its original form, and the reason is the most useful thing I took from it. We validated that the experience worked; what didn't scale was running destinations remotely, as a travelling team. The honest conclusion was that to be sustainable, the model needed a founder to relocate and root a single coliving in one place until it could run (and eventually travel) on its own, before opening new destinations.
So the project ended having answered its real question: not “do people want this?” (they clearly did) but “can it be built the way we were building it?” Knowing the difference between a validated experience and a validated business is the thing I carried into every product decision since.