COTSWOLD Feature A cut above
With four small children to look after, Vanessa Arbuthnott was looking for a creative outlet to give her a short break from mum duties. On finding the pottery class at the local college was full, she opted instead for a surface print course. Now, 20 years later she has just launched her eleventh fabric collection and her designs grace the pages of all the best home interiors books and magazines. She told Sue Smith how it all began.
AT the age of 13 Vanessa gave up art at school when her Austrian grandmother insisted she learned German instead. She trained as a nurse and for
years her only foray into anything artistic was through the usual creative chaos that ensues in a house full of children involving sticking, gluing and painting. But that part-time print course
became the tipping point in Vanessa’s life. “I became obsessive about it,” she
recalls. “I had such a connection and it just felt so right.” Soon anything white in her house
was covered in some sort of design. “My husband Nick used to roll
his eyes and ask if anything was safe from my unbridled creativity,” she says. A few commissions for friends
followed – tablecloths depicting cockerels, octopus for bathroom blinds. But it was a house move to her
current location at Calmsden near Cirencester that really set the ball rolling. She and Nick, a trained architect,
bought a couple of cowsheds to convert into a family home. “I think the cows were still here as we were moving in,” she laughs.
It was a major undertaking – they
brought over original French windows from France to look out on what is now a pretty courtyard garden. And all the while Vanessa was
designing and covering anything in sight. Soon the property was in demand
as a backdrop for companies like Colefax and Fowler and for magazine shoots. Country Living featured the
house in some form or another constantly for around four years. It was on the back of one feature
she was offered the chance to publicise her own fabrics and that’s when everything snowballed. “I had around two months to get
some proper samples together,” she says. “Then the customers started to
come, followed by the shops wanting to stock the fabrics.” What had started out as a little
cottage industry from the kitchen table was soon a thriving business and Vanessa had to quickly expand? She now employs seven people
and a Parcelforce courier arrives twice daily, once to deliver fabrics and again to collect the orders that pour in. Vanessa’s new collection,
22 COTSWOLDESSENCE | September - November 2013
www.cotswoldessence.co.uk
Vanessa Arbuthnott sorting through samples of material
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