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COTTAGE INDUSTRY Cabbages & Roses
Christina has spent many hours hunting for beautiful pieces of often pink china, old glass bottles, prints, frames and paintings from antique fairs including Sunbury Antiques Market and The Old Cinema on Chiswick High Road.
Cottage INDUSTRY
Christina Strutt’s charming sixteenth-century cottage in the Somerset countryside is the living embodiment of her lifestyle brand Cabbages & Roses
FEATURE HANNAH NEWTON PHOTOGRAPHY CLAIRE WORTHY
ABOVE The kitchen is sited where the sitting room used to be. Christina’s collection of vintage pink and floral patterned china can be seen on the dresser. LEFT Christina stands at the front door of the cottage with Jack Russell terrier Wilfrid. For more information on Christina’s designs, visit cabbagesand roses.com I n 1979, a young Vogue journalist drove out of London in her Citroën 2CV to work on a photoshoot with then Vogue art director, Barney Yan. That young journalist was Christina Strutt, who was just 25 years old at the time and was taken by Barney, after the shoot, to meet his friend Mark Strutt, who lived nearby. “That was the first time I met Mark and saw the cottage,” she says.
The cottage is a sixteenth-century former mill house, boasting the beautiful soft, honey-coloured hues of the Bath stone it was built from and a gin-clear brook ambling gently past it. Mark, who grew up in the valley where it resides, inherited the cottage from his parents in 1976.
Christina and Mark married in 1980 and Christina relocated from London to the rolling hills of Somerset.
The vintage chest of drawers and chair in the hall are teamed with Alderney Charcoal linen curtains and a Tulips & Roses cushion, all from Cabbages & Roses. Most of the lamp bases in the house are inherited and topped with shades from Oka. The rug is rush matting from Chairworks.
Woodwork painted in Farrow & Ball’s Off White complements the soft pink and red tones of the furnishings in the sitting room. An antique quilt and piles of cushions including several Jolly Stripe Red cushions from Cabbages & Roses cover the sofa.
“I remember feeling so happy being in this lush, verdant valley,” Christina explains. “I was always happier in the country than in the city and, although I lived in Regent’s Park and loved my job, I had a secret yearning to be a gardener.”
Christina’s yearning came true and in the grounds of her home she tends a productive vegetable plot. Surrounding the oak pavilion, which is used as an al fresco dining room during the summer, are virile bushes of hydrangeas, peonies, roses and foxgloves, all competing for attention.
Over the years, the property evolved as Christina and Mark’s family developed. Their children, Kate and Edward, were fortunate enough to grow up in this deeply bucolic landscape, splashing in the brook and climbing the large weeping willow, whose heavy boughs sweep backwards and forwards across the garden. In the mid-1980s Christina decided she wanted to create a bigger kitchen and dining space that would become the heart of the home. This entailed relocating the small former kitchen from its original humble site in the parlour to what was then the sitting room. Today, it is a warm and welcoming space that is very much at the centre of family life with its original inglenook fireplace, an Aga, a Welsh dresser and shelves filled with mismatched white crockery and antique jugs and bowls.
Next door, the parlour is now a cosy sitting room, replete with stacks of coffee table books, landscape paintings – mainly inherited from Mark’s family – and deeply plump sofas laden with vintage cushions and throws.
Christina, who is the founder of the British fashion and lifestyle brand Cabbages & Roses, has a magpie nature, spending countless hours scour ing antique
ABOVE The former kitchen parlour was transformed into a snug sitting room in the mid 1980s. Sunlight floods the room through a window dressed with curtain fabric from Cabbages & Roses. The walls are adorned with vintage paintings from antique fairs including Shepton Mallett.
The master bedroom is a quietly elegant and tranquil space with the bed dressed in Cerise Hatley linen from Cabbages & Roses. The ornate mirror above the bed is a family heirloom and the prints and paintings alongside are all from antique shops or inherited.
fairs such as Ardingly and Kempton Park, adding to her love of vintage. “I collect and hoard treasures and they all eventually find their place,” she says.
Cabbages & Roses is a romantically English brand, with wallpapers, fabrics and clothing designed with delicate floral motifs and printed in soft muted, monochrome tones. This classic look is adored the world over; the company has a global following from Tokyo to Texas.
It all began in 1999. “My friend Brigette Buchanan (of swingseat company Odd Ltd) and I fell in love with an old quilt which I think belonged to her great aunt,” Christina explains. “The faded fabric was so beautiful that we had to recreate it in a way that replicated its age and worn beauty. This was ‘Bees’, our first fabric,
ABOVE The feeling of serenity continues into the en-suite bathroom, which features Cabbages & Roses wallpaper in Catherine Rose. RIGHT A quirky archway leads off the master bedroom into Christina’s dressing room. The bed valance was found at an antique market and the curtains are in Cabbages & Roses’ Alderney Raspberry.
ABOVE The oak pavilion enables Christina and her family and friends to spend long summer days and evenings surrounded by the gardens that gave birth to so many of the designs for Cabbages & Roses. The antique garden chairs are a legacy from previous generations of Strutts. “The pavilion provides a cosy space and allows us to be outside whatever the weather,” Christina says.
which then became skirts, dresses, curtains, cushions, quilts, basket liners – an endless parade of things all made in the same fabric – we were in heaven.”
The business is still going strong 22 years later, with daughter Kate now working alongside Christina, and the recent opening of a new shop in Bruton, Somerset. Whether the brand’s designs are inspired by the cottage and the valley it nestles in, or the other way around, is hard to decipher, but one thing is for certain, they blend seamlessly together. “Cabbages & Roses is inseparable from my life and is all encompassing,” Christina says. Indeed, nowhere can the ultimate expression of the brand’s style be found than inside her house.
Stairs from the kitchen lead directly up to the master bedroom, which is decorated with Cabbages & Roses fabrics and furnishings, and painted in Farrow & Ball Strong White. The stone of the walls and the uneven feel of this old building perfectly suits the soft raspberry and delicate cream linen tones of the fabrics and Christina and Mark’s collections of antique paintings and books. “I have a deep love of pink, china, and old prints,” she says. “The softness of the stone of the buildings is the perfect starting point for considering colours, but I don’t believe in deciding on a ‘look’ and going out to find it; I get drawn to one thing and the room grows organically around it.”
Family is central to the couple’s life, and the annexe, which was once a pigsty, was renovated by Mark in the 1990s and today their son Edward, his wife Sophie, and their three children live there.
Living Life Beautifully, one of Christina’s books on interiors, reflects her home, family, work, lifestyle and ethos. “I have always firmly believed that homes need to be filled with more than just lovely things,” she says. “To be really beautiful they must be lived in, with the ‘things’ complementing the human stories that run through them.” n
ABOVE The swimming pool, not far from the house, is the perfect place to while away the hours on a sunny summer’s day. FAR LEFT The front door of the cottage opens out directly into the garden. “I fell in love with the garden the moment I laid eyes on it,” says Christina.
