Nine Weeks. One Life. Your Design.
Whether you’re still working and sensing retirement on the horizon, or you’ve already arrived and found it looks different than you expected — this is the work. Not a program. Not a template. A genuine, unhurried design process for the most important project of your life.
Two courses. One for the approach. One for the arrival. Find yours.
Bespoke guitar crafted using eight Australian timbers by Frank Van Den Boom of Melbourne: Van Den Boom Guitars 2021
Sound familiar?
I picked the guitar up again in my sixties. Not to perform. Not to impress anyone. Simply because something in me knew it was time - that a life without making music was a smaller life than I wanted.
That's the invitation I'm holding out to you now.
Not the guitar specifically. But the gesture of it.
Here - this is yours to play. Your next chapter isn't something that happens to you. It's something you compose. And like any instrument worth playing, it rewards the people who are willing to learn it properly, who sit with the discomfort of early attempts, and who eventually find their own sound.
These two courses are that process, made practical.
I'm not here to hand you a script for retirement. I'm here to help you find your own.
The guitar's been waiting … So have you.
Maybe it arrived quietly - a conversation at the end of a working week, a moment in the garden when you realised you weren't sure what came next. Or maybe it hit harder than that. A health scare. A retirement date circled on a calendar. The children finally gone. A relationship that ended, or one you're hoping might begin.
Whatever brought you here, something in you already knows: the life you've been living is now opening up to a new version for you to create.
The gap between who you were and who you might become is one of the most disorienting places a person can stand.
For most of us, identity has been assembled from the outside in - from roles, responsibilities, routines, and relationships that told us who we were. Take those away, or loosen them, and the question underneath surfaces:
Who am I, when I'm not what I do?
This is not a weakness. It is, in fact, the beginning of the most important design project of your life.
I know this territory from the inside.
In 1983, I stood on a bare paddock in Ballarat North, country Victoria, and was handed an unusual brief: design a funeral centre. Not a building — a place.
Somewhere that could hold the full weight of human grief and, in time, become genuinely beautiful.
Doveton Park, Ballarat North, 2025
Wadawurrung Country, Victoria
Doveton Park, Ballarat North, 1983
Wadawurrung Country, Victoria
What you see now at 'Doveton Park' — the lake, the willows, the colonnade standing at the water's edge, the autumn light moving across the surface — none of it existed. There was grass, and sky, and possibility.
That project taught me something I have carried into every piece of work since: “Abundance doesn't just arrive. It's designed, planted, tended, and given time.”
The images here are not before-and-after in any triumphant sense. They are an honest record of what patient, intentional design can do to place.
The Wellbeing Design Studio exists because the same principles that transform a landscape can transform a life. Your next chapter is creating that place for you to live into.
I want to be careful here, because transformation is not something I can promise and you wouldn't trust me if I did. What I can tell you honestly is what I have witnessed in the people who have done this work with genuine commitment.
A clearer sense of what actually matters to them, not what should matter, not what used to matter, but what genuinely does right now.
A reconnection with things that had been set aside for so long they'd almost forgotten they existed.
A practical, personal, written map of the life they want to be living, not as fantasy, but as design. Something concrete to return to and build from.
And perhaps most unexpectedly, a quality of companionship with others in the same territory that many participants have described as among the most honest and sustaining relationships of this chapter of their lives.
None of that is guaranteed. All of it is possible. And in my experience, it becomes likely the moment someone decides they are genuinely ready to do the work.
You can feel it coming. Retirement is close enough to think about seriously, but far enough away that it’s easy to put off. This course is for people who want to arrive well — with clarity about what genuinely matters to them, and a real sense of who they’ll be when the work identity falls away. Nine weeks to design the approach, so the landing isn’t a surprise.
You’ve arrived. And if you’re honest, it looks a little different to how you imagined it. The structure is gone, the days are yours, and yet something still feels unresolved. This course is for people ready to stop drifting and start designing. Over nine weeks, you’ll work through who you’re becoming, not who you were, and reshape your environment, your rhythms, and sense of purpose to match.
A note on the inaugural pricing
$2,400 is what I am asking for these first cohorts. It will not be what I ask for in subsequent ones. Not because the later courses will be different in their care or their content — they won't be. But because these first participants are extending a particular kind of trust, and I believe that deserves a particular kind of acknowledgement. If you've been wondering whether this is the right moment, this is the right moment.
The Wellbeing Design Studio Guarantee
If this course doesn't change something significant for you, you shouldn't have to pay for it. That's not a marketing line. It's a genuine expression of confidence in this work, and acommitment to the kind of integrity that I believe should underpin any serious professional relationship.
Your artistry, wisdom, sensitivity, and humour have truly brought a new perspective through which I can now view my life and begin to move forward into true wellbeing.
Judy D'O
Thank you so much for your care, support and imparting such knowledge and a different way of looking at things. You have had a profound influence on my life.
Francine M
I found Stuart Porteous's 'Designing Your Wellbeing Home' course very helpful and insightful. Stuart brings warmth, authenticity and positivity to this subject. After decades of living in the same home, and seemingly insurmountable barriers to move somewhere else, I found that some quite straightforward and simple measures have made my space much more liveable and comfortable. Things as simple as task lighting in my kitchen, a lamp for ambience in my lounge and relocating heavily used appliances have made such a difference, without great cost.
Lucy B
Thank you for your help this year with the course, but mostly for your friendship and the overall impact you’vehad on my life in so many positive ways
Chris T
What surprised me most about the course was how we were encouraged to examine our inner self, our life values and how they influence our choices and thus our wellbeing.
Heather W
