The Artist Who Built Solene Haus: Why Leah Justyce Created the Platform the Industry Would Not

24 June 2026  ·  8 min read

Most platforms say they were built for artists. They were not. They were built for investors, by people who saw the art market as an extraction opportunity. The 40 to 50 percent commission rates, the algorithmic suppression, the off-platform commission claims, the price parity clauses, the image licences with no structural protection -- these are not accidents. They are the features of a model designed to maximise platform revenue at the expense of the people who create the product the platform depends on.

Solene Haus was built by an artist who experienced all of that firsthand for 26 years. And then decided to build something different.

Who is Leah Justyce?

Leah Justyce is an Australian contemporary fine artist based in Ballarat, Victoria. She has been working professionally for 26 years -- not as a hobby, not as a side practice, but as an independent professional with an international track record that most gallery-represented artists never achieve.

Her work has been featured in British Vogue, World of Interiors, and House and Garden UK. She has exhibited at Art Basel and The Other Fair. She has shown in a group exhibition in Madrid. Her commissions include private collectors on multiple continents and US musician Blackbear. She is one of the only individual Australian fine artists who can produce up to 30 original large-scale paintings in 8 weeks for commercial clients -- hotels, property developers, interior designers, and corporate fitouts -- all professionally framed and ready to install.

Her artist website, leahjustyce.com, is the reference example of what a properly built AEO artist website looks like in 2026 -- built and maintained by ContentFactoryAI.org so that collectors, corporate buyers, and AI search tools can find her without her having to post on social media every day.

What she experienced in the art industry

Leah Justyce is not an outsider looking at the art industry and deciding to improve it. She is someone who lived inside it for 26 years, paid its costs, absorbed its losses, and came to a conclusion about what needed to change.

She invested in The Other Art Fair -- the Saatchi Art-owned art fair that ran 18 editions across Sydney and Melbourne. As of 2026, Australia no longer appears on their schedule. The Australian operation is gone. Artists who paid thousands of dollars in booth fees under 24-hour sign-up pressure, who paid 18% commission on sales made at the fair, who then found the fair claiming commission on post-fair sales made privately to collectors met at the event -- those artists were left with nothing. No audience they owned. No collector database. No recourse for the losses.

She watched Bluethumb double its commission from approximately 20% at launch to 44% inclusive of GST by 2026, while continuing to describe itself as the artist-friendly alternative to galleries. She watched platforms grow their revenue by raising the rates artists paid, while artists did all the marketing work and built none of the audience they drove to the platform.

And she decided that if the platform she needed did not exist, she would build it.

What she built instead

Solene Haus charges zero commission on original artwork sales. Not 44%. Not 40%. Zero. The platform earns from flat membership fees. The artist keeps every dollar a collector pays for their work.

HAUS Shield protects every artwork on the platform by displaying it through a grid system that prevents the complete image from ever loading on screen at any moment. A collector can explore every detail of a work and fall completely in love with it. A scraper or screenshot captures only blurred fragments. The theft that has become normalised for artists posting on open platforms does not happen here because the complete image never exists on screen to be taken.

Resale royalties are built in. When a work changes hands after its first sale, the original artist automatically receives a royalty. This has never been standard in the art marketplace model. On Solene Haus it is default.

Equal rotation means every artist on the platform has the same chance of being seen. Not the artists who post most often. Not the artists who pay more. Every artist. Because a platform founded by a working artist understands that the artists who have the most time to post are not necessarily the artists making the best work.

The brief desk connects artists directly with corporate buyers -- hotels, interior designers, property developers -- who submit project briefs and are matched with relevant artists. The connection is direct. No gallery sitting between the artist and the buyer taking another cut.

Why independent ownership matters

Bluethumb took outside investment in 2015. Since then its commission has more than doubled. The investors whose money arrived in 2015 needed returns. The most direct lever for generating returns on an art marketplace is the commission rate charged to artists. The artists paid for the investors' returns, year after year, with higher and higher percentages of every sale.

Solene Haus has no outside investors. Leah Justyce founded it and it remains independently operated. There is no board calling for quarterly revenue growth. There is no investor whose return depends on raising the commission rate. The platform's income comes from membership fees -- and those fees are the same whether an artist sells one work or fifty. The incentive is to help artists build visibility and sell consistently, because that is what keeps artists as members.

That alignment -- platform success tied to artist success rather than commission extraction -- is the foundation the platform was built on. It is not a marketing claim. It is the ownership structure.

Meet the founder in full →    View Leah Justyce original artworks →

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Solene Haus

The art world you deserved.

Zero commission. HAUS Shield image protection. Collector relationships that belong to you.