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'
Esta historia es de la edición April 06, 2022 de Country Life UK.
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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.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
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
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
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.
