GAVIN
HOUSLEY
Developer · Musician · Artist · Maker
Thirty years of bookselling, art, music, fashion production, and now programming.
Developer · Musician · Artist · Maker
Thirty years of bookselling, art, music, fashion production, and now programming.
Fullstack JavaScript developer with a background spanning fashion, literature, music and coffee.
Born on the outskirts of London I studied Visual Arts at the University of Plymouth before a detour into bookselling — eventually rising to Head of Fiction at Foyles on Charing Cross Road. Alongside my fascination with books came music: singing and playing guitar in the indie trio William and playing guitar with The Naciente Quartet.
Books and music weren't enough, so I started making my own clothes — a hobby that became six years inside the ethical fashion brand Palava, managing production, embroideries and fabric development. Along the way I also picked up linocut printmaking and followed another passion, working for Monmouth Coffee.
Now I've retrained as a full-stack developer, merging that artistic sensibility with a love of logic and problem-solving.
I completed a JavaScript bootcamp with Northcoders, where I learned the fundamentals of writing clean, functional code. Since finishing I've kept building independently — practicing my vanilla JS, CSS layout, data structures, and working with AI tools as part of the process.
A digital companion to the Book of Changes, built in vanilla HTML/CSS/JS with a coin-throw algorithm modelled on the yarrow stalk method.
A React site for the Norwegian Book Club's 100 greatest books list. Displays origin country with leaflet map and links to a bookshop.org affiliate page.
React Native app with a custom backend — commenting, voting and posting, built end to end. For managing lent books in a community.
Full-stack Reddit-style news app — custom API, database, comments and voting.
My first client project — a business site designed and built for Alina Meyer Coaching.
I've been making linocut prints for a few years. There's something
wonderful about hanging a line of prints up.
Prints available on Etsy →
“Les Onglous” — Linocut, 55×35cm
“Shadows” — Linocut, 31×42cm
“The Chosen One” — Linocut, 40×70cm
“Land of Dreams” — Linocut, 30×30cm
“The Chapel” — Linocut, 35×37.5cm
“The Sage” — Linocut, 37×39cm
Printing process
Getting thrown out of a party for showing up uninvited turned out to be the best thing that happened to me — a friend taught me Wild Thing on bass out of apology, and I never recovered. Since then: bass, guitar, three very different bands, and a solo project that's finally back.
Playing bass with Black Peaches, Park Stage, Glastonbury 2018
My grandmother was a seamstress. I started making my own clothes, then
pattern-cutting courses, and six years inside the small ethical label
Palava learning the craft and business of fashion from the inside out. I
designed everything below.
T-shirts available on Teemill →
