Corporate hippy. Developer. Designer. Finnish.

Finland, then everywhere.

I was born in Finland. My family moved to Malaysia when I was twelve, and I came back to Helsinki at sixteen for high school. Then came an internship at the Finnish embassy in Bangkok, a year in Tokyo writing my master's dissertation, and an internship with the UN in New York. I graduated in political science in Helsinki.

If you're wondering about the accent, that's where it comes from. All of it.

Twenty years in IT.

I joined Nokia and spent seven years running global SAP rollouts. They made me a country manager in Singapore at twenty-seven, then sent me to Sydney. After Nokia I moved into IT management consulting, leading software development teams. We moved to the UK in 2014, and from 2015 I ran programmes at Royal Bank of Scotland.

Software taught me the thing I now do to buildings. Before you design anything, you work out who the user is, what they're trying to do, and in what order. I specify a building the way I used to specify a system. Nobody else in property seems to do this. It's the whole method.

Twenty years of design, at the same time.

I studied interior design at night in Sydney while I was still at Nokia. I founded Decodence there in 2006, part-time. I never left the corporate job to do it, and that was deliberate. I judged that leaving would close doors, not open them.

So the two careers ran side by side for twenty years.

The mill.

In 2010 I bought a derelict nineteenth-century grain mill in Eyemouth at silent auction, for £280,000. Six storeys. Abandoned.

I designed it as one long evening, a floor at a time. Arrive. Dinner. After dinner. Bed. And the penthouse at the top, for some peace. Nothing in that building is decoration-led.

It became our family home, then BBC Scotland's Home of the Year, series 2, episode 1. Today it's guest accommodation. I call it the mothership. It started all of this.

Watch the episode →

The box.

I'd wanted to leave the bank for years. I stayed, built the design business on the side, and the job still got done. Then, in early 2024, I was told I couldn't work from outside the UK. The work was identical wherever I sat. My annual leave was maxed out. And for the first time I saw it plainly: my life and my location were being controlled by a job title.

My life is too big to fit in the box of an office job. I need to be free, and I need to move.

By late 2024 I'd decided to go. An organisational change and a voluntary redundancy offer came after that decision, and I took it. I wasn't made redundant. I left, and the timing was a gift.

It cost me. I lost the salary, the security and the comfort of knowing exactly what my day would look like. I lost the respect a good title buys you. Nobody hands those back.

Why I teach, when I'd rather be on site.

Honestly, given a free choice, I'd just flip property. But I kept having the same conversation. A senior woman, brilliant at her job, with money sitting in an account she can't bring herself to look at.

A friend whose husband managed all the money asked me how she could get an account of her own. Years later he died, and she had no idea what had just landed on her. That's when the penny dropped.

So I built Flip to Freedom. Six weeks. No theory. The route I took, written down, with the tools I actually use.

Now.

I'm full time on Elina James Property and Decodence. I develop property between Scotland and London, and I'm currently acquiring a multimillion development in King's Cross.

I design for homeowners, holiday-let owners and hospitality through Decodence. And I speak to rooms of women about the one thing I wish I'd heard years earlier: nobody is coming to save you.