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Rachael Ashwell, designer and entrepreneur
"A home can be truly lived in and still
be lovely," the interior designer and entrepreneur Rachel Ashwell
declared on her Web site, shabbychic.com. "I
believe in cozy relaxed settings where kids are free to put their feet
on the sofa and guests can place their cups on the coffee table
without a care. For me, the secret to living well is to surround
myself with beautiful things that are practical and deliciously
comfortable." Ashwell is the founder and owner of Shabby Chic, a chain
of six stores and a line of products for the home. Launched in 1989
with one store, in Santa Monica, California, Shabby Chic has grown
into a mini-industry that, in 2003, grossed $15 million and
encompasses the manufacture of furniture, bedding, household
accessories, and clothing sold in hundreds of retail establishments in
addition to the Shabby Chic shops; many items sell through the
Internet as well. As of 2004 Shabby Chic had grown from a one-woman
business to an operation with 125 employees, among them Brian Dell,
the company's president; Ashwell still serves as the firm's sole
designer and buyer. Since 1999 Ashwell has also hosted a television
program, Rachel Ashwell's Shabby Chic, currently broadcast on
the Style network, and she has written five coffee-table books:
Shabby Chic (co-authored by Glynis Costin, 1996), Rachel
Ashwell’s Shabby Chic Treasure Hunting and Decorating Guide
(1998), The Shabby Chic Home (2000), Shabby Chic: The Gift
of Giving (2001), and Shabby Chic: Sumptuous Settings and Other
Lovely Things (scheduled for publication in November 2004).
The apparently oxymoronic term "shabby
chic" (which, as a proper name, she has trademarked) identifies
Ashwell's style, which calls for decorating one’s home with gently
worn antique furnishings--or new tables, chairs, sofas, beds, bureaus,
rugs, lamps, and other items constructed, as Ashwell specifies, to
look like serviceable secondhand household effects reminiscent of
bygone fashions. In the
belief that a home should have a lived-in air and serve as a cozy
"cocoon," she favors sofas with extra-puffy cushions (which one need
not feel obliged to plump up after people have sat on them), tables
with small dents and other imperfections, and lots of
flowers—preferably, English roses, which add further to the ambience
when they begin to wilt. The style "bespeaks old-money, upper-class
pleasure . . . ," Amy Wilson wrote for the California Orange County
Register (December 10, 2001). "It’s eclectic, ostensibly
mismatched and flea-market driven, but has been reworked by Ashwell to
be the essence of comfortable wealth, without all that requisite
priss, pretension or primogeniture." (Wilson added, parenthetically,
"Which does not mean it’s cheap.") In the Los Angeles Times
(July 29, 1999), Mimi Avins
observed, "Many of the women who want to own . . . Shabby Chic home
furnishings are also, consciously or unconsciously, buying a piece of
the image [Ashwell] projects: a hard-working mother who values beauty,
comfort and practicality but has neither the patience nor inclination
to insist on perfection."
To ensure that nonmatching furniture
and accessories do not clash or look haphazard, Ashwell sticks to a
palette of whites, creams, pale pinks, pale blues, and pale sea-foam
greens. For simple, inexpensive maintenance, she advises covering
wooden furniture with glossy or semi-gloss paint (white, preferably)
and protecting upholstered chairs and sofas with washable slipcovers,
made with the launder-friendly, vintage-style fabrics that Shabby Chic
markets. "I think one
of the secrets of [Shabby Chic’s] success is that it’s such an easy
style to live with, and it’s easy on the eye," Ashwell told Gabrielle
Fagan for the Irish News
(March 24, 2003). "The key ingredients are beauty, comfort and
function. I believe
nothing should be so precious that it can’t be touched, and everything
should not simply look lovely but should be useful. One should live in
and around one’s possessions and not be dominated by them."
Ashwell was born Rachel Greenfield on
October 30, 1959 in
Cambridge, England, and raised in London. Her father, Elliott
Greenfield, is Jewish; her mother, Shirley, is Christian. She has an
older sister, Deborah Greenfield, who has illustrated two of Ashwell's
books. Deborah Greenfield is a prize-winning choreographer and
flamenco dancer; she founded and directs the dance company Rosa Negra
Flamenco. The sisters' father was a book dealer who specialized in
rare, old editions; their mother bought, restored, and then resold
antique dolls and teddy bears. While the girls were growing up, they
accompanied their parents on hundreds of trips to flea markets,
antique fairs, and other places where their father and mother bought
most of their merchandise. In her mother’s case, this included old
lace and other materials necessary for constructing new but
old-looking apparel for vintage dolls. "I saw [my parents] both
treasure hunting, if you like, and turning it into an entrepreneurial
thing," Ashwell explained to Mimi Avins. She told Rachel Bridge for
the London Sunday Times (February 29, 2004), "Following my
father around the markets taught me how to make quick decisions" about
what was or was not worth buying. "My mother taught me how to restore
without ruining the integrity of the piece, and without taking it so
far that it was this slick unrecognisable new thing." In fixing
antique dolls, Ashwell told Avins, her mother "knew just when to stop
. . . , and I liked that she
wouldn’t make them quite perfect."
By the time she had entered her teens,
Ashwell herself was selling antiques in London markets. She dropped
out of school at 16 and, by
age 19, had moved to Los
Angeles, California. There, despite her lack of a high-school diploma,
she found work as a wardrobe stylist and set designer for TV and film
companies and producers of commercials. According to Mimi Avins, she
specialized in period settings. "What she lacked in formal education
she made up for with taste, grit and inventiveness," Avins wrote.
Sometimes, Ashwell recalled to Bridge, she would "driv[e] around
Sunset Boulevard in the sunshine, seeing big houses and cars, and
thinking this is the land of opportunity."
During the 1980s Ashwell married a man who directed
commercials. She was a full-time homemaker and mother, raising a
toddler and an infant, when, during the second half of that decade,
she and her husband divorced. Unwilling to take on jobs like those she
had had earlier, because of the overly long hours they required, she
cast about for another way to earn a living. Interior decorating
struck her as a viable option. The attractiveness and practicality of
the slipcovers with which she had covered her sofa and chairs after
the birth of her first child had elicited compliments from her
friends, some of whom had expressed the desire to own such slipcovers
themselves. (Various sources imply that she herself made the
slipcovers, but in an interview with Amy Wilson, she said, "I don’t
actually sew." She has also admitted that she isn’t especially "handy"
when it comes to refinishing furniture.) Banking on the appeal of her
design ideas to a wider audience, in 1989 Ashwell borrowed $50,000
from her ex-husband (which she later repaid) and opened a
home-furnishings shop in Santa Monica, California. She named the store
Shabby Chic and stocked it with about $30,000 worth of items,
primarily slipcovers and antique furniture that she had bought at flea
markets and then had refinished and/or recovered, using fabric that
she had "aged" by laundering them with tea-colored water in her
washing machine. Everything sold within a few weeks. Recalling the
beginnings of her business, she told Bridge, "I knew about fabrics,
and vintage, but nothing about business, and my lessons have been my
experiences. Now when I open a store I know I need [money for]
expenses and working capital, but the first store I worked out on a
piece of paper. If a table sold, it didn’t occur to me that I needed
another one. . . . In a funny kind of way the innocence of how I
did it, rather than being big and slick, was what spoke to people."
By 1991 Ashwell had opened two additional
stores, one in New York City and the other in San Francisco,
California. Since then she has added three more, in Chicago, Illinois,
and Malibu and Newport Beach, in California. Whereas she originally
sold only secondhand goods, the necessity of replenishing stock
quickly and her lack of sufficient time to accomplish that through
flea-market purchases led her to turn to the manufacture of furniture
and other "shabby-chic" items of her own design. She has steadily
expanded her inventory to include such products as lampshades, chair
cushions, ottomans, bedding, fabrics, and tote bags. Shabby Chic Baby
offers such merchandise as cribs, changing tables, blankets, crib
bumpers, lamps, and bibs. Also available, through Shabby Chic Studio,
is slipcovered furniture that is less expensive than other Shabby Chic
furniture. Shabby Chic and even Shabby Chic Studio prices might be
described as upscale: as of mid-August 2004, according to its Web
site, the price of one style of 16-by-12-inch Shabby Chic lampshade
was $180; a small lampshade for a chandelier bulb, $72; a flowered,
ruffled, standard-size pillowcase, $78; the baby bib, $20; and the
changing table, $275 (with pad and pad cover costing an additional $50
and $78, respectively). In February 2004
Simply Shabby Chic, a collection of less costly Shabby Chic home
furnishings and bedding that Ashwell designed exclusively for Target
stores, became available.
Ashwell's celebrity devote´es are said
to include Madonna, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, and Anthony Hopkins.
She has served as a decorator for the actress and singer Jennifer
Lopez twice: in 2003, for
Lopez's restaurant, Madre's, in Pasadena, California, and in 2004, for
Lopez's wedding, held in her backyard, to the actor Marc Anthony.
Although Ashwell has often been compared to the famous doyenne of
interior decoration Martha Stewart, their philosophies and approaches
differ significantly. In demonstrating home-decorating projects, for
example, Stewart strived to hide any imperfections in the items she
was working on; indeed, the goals of many of her projects were to hide
defects in household articles. Ashwell, by contrast, believes that
there is beauty in imperfection. She said to Mimi Avins, "That
philosophical base can be applied to all kinds of things. Everything
you do. What you wear. How you live." In addition, as Ashwell said to
Amy Wilson, Martha Stewart "can tell you how to grow the wheat to make
the bread that she puts on a plate; I
can tell you to take things out of the freezer and how to arrange them
beautifully on a plate."
Ashwell and her daughter, Lily, and
son, Jake, live in Malibu, California. Photos of her house, which she
remodeled several years ago, appear in her book Shabby Chic Home.
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