LAURELS are never quite as comfortable a place to rest as people imagine, especially when you've had the satisfaction of building the most distinctive high-street brand since Laura Ashley to create that holy grail of retail: a magical mix of originality, desirability and accessibility. In such a case, what next?
For Cath Kidston, the circuitous route to this particular dilemma started after a stint working for the interior designer Nicky Haslam, when she co-founded a shop selling curtainalia on the borders of Chelsea and Fulham in London. Five years later, she struck out on her own, selling fabrics and accessories in bold florals that flew in the face of the prevailing taste for pallid Modernism. Initially, she ploughed a lonely furrow, but, soon, word spread and, over the following decade, her business grew from a single store in west London to 136, including one next to Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly. Cath Kidston tents, phones and radios followed.
The subsequent pace at which the business flourished was built not on a desire for world domination, but an ability to garner the influences of foreign trips, exhibitions and days spent rootling around antiques markets and galleries—and turn them into well-made furnishings and clothing that made her customers happy and didn't cost the earth.
'Luxury was not a hot tub, but deep shag pile in the bathroom and a pretty eiderdown in the guest bedroom'
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 06, 2022 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 06, 2022 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
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Best of British
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Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
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Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.