Paths is our journal where we tell stories of colour and home; sharing roads, steps and paths that lead you from here to a future place and space.
1.1
Simplicity in a glass of milk
Simplicity in living has been on my mind – both in how I run my business and in our own lives at home. Why do we long for simple now? - because I don’t feel I’m alone in the puzzle of more/less/better/please-take-my-phone-away. And why has simple living changed its current position in our shared imagination of the life (and homes) we want to live with? Perhaps because simple is currently quite hard to have. Life and society are currently noisy, complex, troubling, and yet abundant.
And we always want what we currently don’t have.
1.2
Lunching Ladies: the visual story behind the launch of our Maps of Colour
Choosing colour is intimate. A river running, the slick of a horse’s rump, a painting of flowers, Keats, friendships, the flight of a lark and a brown paper parcel tied up with string - are all primeval and real sources of joy for someone. And they say “this is me, this is home”. Being your own advisor with colour, nuance and detail feels to me, to be the right way forward.
In July we launched our Maps of Colour - our gift to our customers and a guide to creating your very own colour palette. For every colour in our collection, I arranged a path of eight that I know will work together beautifully: two whites, two neutrals, two mid-tones, a deep and a surprise. You may want to use all of them or just two, but knowing that this colour leads to that colour, I hope makes choosing easier and a much more creatively fulfilling approach.
1.3
Ice Cream and icy happiness
Pleasure.
Colour can be a joyful and visceral delight. It doesn’t have to be anymore complicated, than that it makes you happy. It should bring you pleasure as well as comfort and safety. This is the heart of our Ice Cream. Equal parts contentment, joy and delight.
I make ice cream for people that I love. The focused and delicate cooking of good eggs and cream. Then the stirring in of delicious bits, flavours and spices. In our house almost always a bay leaf and then whatever is growing or tucked in our spice drawer. And then time. Time for the custard to cool and infuse, time for friends. Sometimes the ice cream is presented in beautiful bowls, sometimes the metal bucket is passed around with spoons.
1.4
The abundance of the present
It is easy to be ensnared by the desire for more. More rooms, more money to buy more things to fill those rooms and more recognition for having said ‘things’. Sometimes this ‘more’ is thought of as abundant and to have less than this feels meagre.
It feels right to think of abundance at this time of year. A veritable glut of produce as well as high holiday consumption of a sort, mingling with holiday thinking time. There is nothing like hot weather to make you do nothing but think deeply.
1.5
Thinking of jam on toast on a sulky March Sunday
Inside my wonky childhood memory, we had twenty seven fruit trees in our back yard. I’m sure it wasn’t that precise number – likely more, but still there was an incredibly splendid feeling of towering trees and surging vines.
1.6
Two courgettes and good ingredients for paint
Two courgettes from the farmer’s market. A nub of local cheese from last night’s dinner. A jar of good white beans. Some pickles. A root around the salad drawer finds an onion, a papery clove of garlic and a forgotten bottle of Sussex fizz.