Samuel Collett
Founder
An award-winning entrepreneur, Samuel has always been drawn to understanding what sits beneath a choice.
About HoWA / Our story
How we create a sense of home.
HoWA began with a fascination with how human beings live. How we form habits, carry responsibilities, care for one another and find meaning in the everyday.
Read our story
The founders
The people behind HoWA.
Alexander Oakley
Co-founder, House of Willow Alexander
Alongside his husband, Samuel co-founded House of Willow Alexander, the home and garden care business that brought these interests into daily practice.
01 / Anthropology
A home is an intensely personal expression of human life.
It holds our rituals, our histories, our possessions and our relationships.
The same space can mean security to one person, freedom to another, and responsibility to someone else.
02 / In practice
Working with people and their homes revealed how much care depends on knowledge.
It also made visible the work that so often goes unrecognised.
- Remembering
- Researching
- Organising
- Anticipating
- Following up
03 / The question
The advent of AI opened a possibility that Samuel found compelling:
Could technology understand enough of this context to meaningfully lighten that load?
That question is at the heart of HoWA.
04 / Building HoWA
Information, understanding and care.
Working alongside his technology and systems architecture team, Samuel is building a product around the relationship between information, understanding and care.
Information about a home becomes more useful when it connects with the priorities, preferences and circumstances of the people living there.
05 / Your way
The ambition is for HoWA to adapt to how people choose to live.
Different households have different rhythms, resources and definitions of a good life.
Support should be responsive to those differences, with people retaining control over what they share, what matters to them and what happens next.
Harmony
For us, harmony means the practical parts of life working more comfortably together.
- 01
Fewer things to hold in your head
- 02
Clearer decisions
- 03
Support that fits your circumstances
House of Willow Alexander is HoWA's founding operating partner, the real-world home and garden business that first tested the idea. HoWA is an independent technology company built to work with many brands, services and homes.
Our contribution
Less stress. Greater agency.
We believe AI creates an opportunity to make this kind of understanding more accessible. HoWA is our contribution to that possibility, bringing human curiosity, practical experience and thoughtful engineering together to help people live with less stress, greater agency and more room for the things they care about.
