RETAILER PROFILE | Ligneous Kitchens
Sales director Adam Prickett (left) and design director Colin Morrell (right)
HEART AND SOUL of LUXURY’
‘The
Combining skills in cabinet-making, joinery, building and design, when Colin Morrell and Adam Prickett joined forces to sell high-end German kitchens, the decision to open a showroom was a no-brainer. Chris Frankland gets the story
I
f you are opening your first showroom, it helps to have a clear vision. And Colin Morrell and Adam Prickett knew exactly what they wanted to do – sell high-end German kitchens. “We knew that doing high-end German kitchens, selling £200,000- plus Eggersmanns without the showroom would have been impossible,” explains sales director Adam Prickett. “But it had to be the right showroom. And we had seen a number of options, but the moment we walked through the door here we thought about it for all of five seconds.” Prickett could see that a main street in affluent Walton-on-Thames in Surrey would be ideal. It is close to Esher and Oxshott and the area is bristling with
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gated estates, such as the famous St George’s Hill in Weybridge. “So this showroom was a no-brainer,” he adds. As well as Eggersmann, Ligneous Kitchens also sells kitchens by Bax, KH (badged as Ligneous Made in Germany) and Störmer, as well as its own bespoke furniture offering. When Prickett and design director Colin Morrell took on the showroom, it was an empty shell. “Everything else you see in the showroom we have constructed,” Prickett continues. “The ceiling as well. Originally, it was just nasty polystyrene foam panels and we have replastered it and resculpted it. As a qualified plasterer, I knew what was possible with a coffered ceiling. It has also improved the acoustics. I built
everything. And many of the fittings come straight out of our workshop. We also put it in a hidden utility room behind a door in one display and will also have a hidden tap display with around 50 taps.”
Cabinet-making Morrell’s background is in cabinet- making. He trained at Parnham College, run by famous-name furniture maker John Makepeace. From there, he and three others from the college set up their own workshop making one-off pieces of furniture. As he recalls: “We quickly realised you can’t make much of a living doing one-off pieces on your own and the clients I had were friends and family. Then we picked up some corporate
clients, making reception desks and the like. Then we started making furniture for other interiors designers as a manufacturing workshop rather than doing our own thing. That got me into joinery and we did some manufacturing for David Linley.”
Then he started Fine Edge Design with another company and bought into a joinery workshop run by two Germans doing high-end residential and a few corporate
projects. This went into
liquidation in 2016 and Morrell decided to go it alone and set up Ligneous in 2017. He teamed up with one of his German colleagues to buy all the assets from the liquidator and set up a workshop on a much reduced scale, which is still going today and produces one-off pieces for Ligneous.
· November 2021
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