Okay yes it is true, I have been away. I could pretend that it was only a matter of days, just casually pick up where I left off but that would seem disingenuous, a bit like the guilty emails I send to my mother that read as a seamless spontaneous outpouring but actually take three disjointed weeks to write. The question of my absence, the where did you go, is moot. I could argue writer’s block, but in my experience there is no such thing, it is just a more creative way of saying lazy. So actually maybe it was writer’s block. Blogs are tricky, you start out with such ace reporter enthusiasm but quickly end up hack journalist, turn from writing because you...read more

I don't know if you watch Game Of Thrones but in it is a huge wall of ice called not unreasonably The Wall. It is a man and magic made folly, three hundred miles long, seven hundred feet high, forever looming. On this side a near insurmountable climb, on the other permanent winter. I have another name for The Wall. Christmas. Now don’t misunderstand me, I love Christmas, what is there not to love (insert favourite Christmas cliche here) but do we have to do it every year? I know it is important from a retail, I mean a religious point of view but couldn’t we sort of alternate? One year on one year off or maybe every four years. Oh yes,...read more

I like my fabric plain. Not boring plain, texture is good, handle, nap, colour but I have always felt that patterned fabric overwhelms form and dates rapidly. This is especially apparent if a chair or sofa has beautiful proportion then very often the line that makes them desirable is obscured by converging, colliding pattern. You can always dress a plain sofa up if you wish, with patterned cushions or throws, things that you can change at will, but try changing the look of a patterned sofa and you will be on a hiding to nothing. If a chair or sofa has good proportion then it has the human body to thank for it, after all their primary function is to compliment our shape...read more

icandy

Fashion is unfamiliarity. The reason that fashion doesn’t last is simple. It preys on a very basic human mechanism. Curiousity. We are hardwired to notice the unfamiliar, for good reason. Can I eat it? Can I sleep with it? Can it kill me? Once we have identified it as a rock, a sheep and a tree we lose interest. This doesn’t stop the fashion industry from continually redesigning rocks, sheep and trees though. And when I say the fashion industry I don’t just mean clothes, I mean everything from cars to HP sauce, everything that is old is new again. But this is not always a good thing. Sometimes familiarity breeds content. We all have things that we love...read more

Designers wear beards. There I’ve said it, I wasn’t going to because I’m not sure anyone else has noticed. It used to be those skinny rectangular glasses and scarves in summer but now it is beards. I don’t mean goatees, I mean proper, full on, is that a robin I see nesting, beards. I’m talking about men designers of course, well mostly. They can be tangly, or boxy or straggly as long as they are manly, serious, has anyone seen my pipe beards. Just got back from Tent London, via Super Brands and Design Junction. Three major shows in The London Design Festival, lots of capital letters in the capital city and what did...read more

Working with family is never easy but when you are running a family business it is difficult to avoid. Not only do I have a brother as a main supplier but I also work with my wife and my two youngest sons are currently in the shop basement stuffing cushions (my oldest, the nine year old, has conveniently decided that he is going to be a lawyer and helping out at the family firm would be exploitation and demonstrate an unacceptable lowering of aspiration). I wouldn’t change it though, working with family is a privilege and you get to sleep with the boss guilt free. Once you learn to navigate and negotiate, instigate and ingratiate you’ll be fine, there are however lines...read more

Inspiration is a funny old thing, subject as it now is to the prosaic. Even the word itself has become pedestrian. No longer the sole province of divine influence, inspiration can now refer to the inexplicable impulse you felt just before covering your entire car in pink polyester fur. You can even blame it for the irresistible urge to have a weird flightless bird tattooed on your neck or the writing of a love poem to your girlfriend’s mother. Inspiration can be that versatile and that uninspiring. Even so I must confess to struggling with the occasional bout. I love the feeling as an unbidden idea rises in my mind like some ever expanding bubble from the deep. POP! True most of...read more

Having not wanted it because I thought it would be rubbish I have been convinced by an overwhelming number of women (two) that it would be a good idea to have the inside of our Hove store Googlified. Googlification is when a very nice chap takes loads of photos of the store, stitches them together and creates our own little street view but inside our shop. You can see why I thought it would be rubbish because it sounds like embarrassingly large pants. And it might well have been but Mike (Pageturner Photography) has done a very nice job and left me rather pleasantly surprised. Of course I have had to suffer a certain amount of I told you so, eat...read more

There follows a little digression. It was meant to be nine tips on buying a sofa but as per usual something strange happened on the way to the topic. There are still nine things but they are less than succinct and probably don’t contain anything like enough keywords. Helen is losing patience with me. With any luck there is some useful stuff buried beneath the puff and I promise that I will attempt to do a proper sofa buying guide at some as yet unspecified time in the future. Well, I promise to try. Who knows, I will probably end up talking about horses.

1. Not all furniture is created equal.
Making beautiful furniture beautifully in England is not easy. In fact it is rather tricky....read more

If Cornwall didn't exist then someone would have to invent it. God maybe. It is a place of ineffable beauty, a land of savage seascape, rolling hills, cumulus woodland, hidden churches and horizontal weather. It has some of the most gorgeous empty beaches you will ever see, assuming a local tells you where they are. There are pathways that follow myriad pasture into gloaming dell before rising into the blinking brilliance of an unexpected shoreline. It has spectacular cliff side towns that cling like kittiwake nests whilst ancient harbour walls push out into cresting seas like the bows of stone galleon. There is the lazy turn of hypnotic turbine juxtaposed with the diligent death of glorious industry, flashes of silver light on captured quarry,...read more