Our Story 2000 - 2016
Two friends, one scrap of faded floral fabric, five children gadding underfoot, incalculable pots of tea & diet coke – and zero spread sheets: the Cabbages & Roses story begins.
1980
Christina, our founder, trades in the high-octane glamour of life at Vogue for marriage and raising her two children amid rural bliss and the undulating Somerset hills.
A long way from Vogue House, she creates a perfect pastoral idyll within the kind, ancient walls of Brook Cottage, all while continuing to style for magazines and take on interior design commissions.
In the year 2000
Christina discusses the delights of deliciously faded florals with her dear friend and fellow Vogue alumnus, Brigette Buchanan. Enchanted by an ancient quilt that had once belonged to Brigette’s aunt, a thunderbolt of inspiration struck: they would create a mail order
business selling poignantly gentle florals redolent of a vanishing England.
Cabbages & Roses is born
Its evocative name is a nod to the marriage of its enduring softness and beauty with a earthier utilitarian sensibility and the sense that everything it makes will be built to last.
With that, our founders go straight to work. They stuff envelopes with mail order catalogues. They pop up in Liberty’s. They feature amid the pages of magazines, whose editors are enchanted. They studiously avoid spread sheets.
2001, Kinnerton Street
Cabbages & Roses' first pop up with Christina's darling friend Maureen.
Langton Street
Cabbages & Roses moves into its very first permanent home beyond Brook Cottage when Christina opens the doors to a shop on Langton Street, Chelsea. With its roaring fire and painted wood-panelled walls, it is instantly the most seductive spot in London, a cosy cocoon in the city.
Christina’s good friend John Robinson, founder of Jigsaw, invests, enabling her one-time bricks-and-mortar reverie to come to be made flesh.
Christina pens her first two books, the beginning of a prolific string of beautiful coffee table tomes. Titled Vintage Chic and Vintage Crafts, they earn her a whole new raft of devotees, all taken with her genius for sourcing and restoring forgotten treasures to former glories.
2005
On a roll, Cabbages & Roses unveils a second shop, this time in Notting Hill, and soon follows that up with a third on Wandsworth Common. Slowly slowly, London is getting a floral makeover and a ‘shabby chic’ movement is born, all while Christina – never one to sit still – pens a third book, Home Made Vintage: Charming Projects For Home And Garden.
2006
Cabbages & Roses crosses the Rubicon from cult brand eulogized by the cognoscenti to household name as Jigsaw unveils concessions in 25 of its stores across the UK.
2007
Christina, as an early adopter of ecological concerns, shares her long- and deeply held views about sustainability in her fourth book, A Guide To Natural Housekeeping, which gives readers practical tips and inspiration for keeping homes both clean and free of chemicals.
2007
True to the form of a family company, Brigitte's daughter Violet joins Christina and the Cabbage Patch as her long time creative partner, collaborator and friend.
2008
The Cabbages & Roses story began with one foot in the garden, Christina’s green-fingered efforts a perennial inspiration for its seasonal collections. A collaboration on an organic tweed collection for The Soil Association with Jigsaw feels like a commission of dreams.
2009
Christina’s fifth book, At Home With Country, celebrates the romance of the rural life and celebrates how to bring a slice of bucolic bliss to any home – no matter whether achingly urban or perfectly pastoral.
2010
Cabbages & Roses begins to take its first global steps, signing a licensing agreement in Japan, where its softly romantic florals and quintessential Englishness have developed a cult following. In 2011, just over a decade of hard work is rewarded with a nomination for an Innovation & Design Award by the British Chamber of Commerce in Japan.
Then with all the necessary agreements signed, the first standalone stop opens in Tokyo, faithfully replicating the DNA of the flagship Langton Street store.
Concurrently, a department store space opens in Lumine Tokyo. It’s official: Japan has Cabbage fever.
While our florals scatter their petals in the east, so too do they begin to flutter towards the west as we sign a licensing deal in the USA for quilting fabrics with Moda.
2013
A momentous year in the life of our cabbage patch. A collaboration with Uniqlo that will appear in shop windows across 1,200 shops worldwide gets underway – and the proceeds enable Christina to buy back shares from Robinson Webster Holdings, with that becoming fully independent.
The seeds she sewed long ago are coming to full fruition, and to mark it, Cabbages & Roses moves its HQ and flagship store to a
beautiful new shop on Chelsea’s Sydney Street.
2014
Living Life Beautifully, a coffee table tome dedicated to the exquisite homes that inspire and inform their owners’ creative work, finds its way out into the world.
2015
Christina signs a licensing agreement with British stalwart John Lewis to produce bedding, rolling out our designs to the boudoirs of the British public across the length of the land.
2016
In the early days, Christina and Brigette’s children were ever frolicking somewhere in the near vicinity. Now its familial roots come full circle as Kate, Christina’s daughter, moves back from her posts overseas in Hong Kong and New York, to take up the helm as Managing Director of Cabbages & Roses.
