THE POWER BEHIND THE PILLOWCASES

She turned the simplest of ideas – white cotton bedlinen – into a multimillion-pound business. Margarette Driscoll meets White Company founder, mother-of-four and charity campaigner CHRISSIE RUCKER PHOTOGRAPHS Suki Dhanda

White Company founder Chrissie Rucker on the simple idea that sparked an empire

Chrissie Rucker is the woman whose eye for beautiful linens and comforting clothes has brought a little taste of luxury into our lives. If it’s Sunday morning, you might be snuggled in one of her soft robes or have slept between her crisp, hotel-grade sheets. You might be sipping coffee from one of her artisan mugs. Everyone seems to own something, however small, from The White Company, and that ubiquity has brought Chrissie riches beyond imagination – even though she’s an unlikely entrepreneur who scraped a grade C in maths O-level, and is ‘hopeless’ with spreadsheets.

Walk into any of The White Company’s high-street stores and you’re immediately enveloped in Chrissie’s luxurious ‘cashmere bubble’. Flick through its catalogue and you’ll wonder how you’ve lived without silver-rimmed eggcups or a heart-shaped ramekin. What started out as bedlinen and towels has morphed into a gift-wrapped glimpse of a life most of us can only dream about. A life that looks a lot like Chrissie’s own.

At 47, she looks as fabulous as she did in her 20s, having refined a signature easy-chic style of a floaty white top and slim jeans, chunky silver jewellery and toenails in the same shade of taupe as her strappy sandals. She has four children, three dogs, ‘too many’ horses, a £12.5 million country estate – the gardens planted only with white flowers – and a £4 million townhouse round the corner from the Beckhams in London’s Holland Park. Then there’s an uber-swish ski chalet in Klosters, so grand it rents at £30,000 a week.

It all screams control freak, but Chrissie is surprisingly down to earth: having it all is one thing, running it all, quite another. ‘I can assure you my home does not look like one of our room sets,’ she laughs. ‘There are clothes everywhere. We live in the country, so we have the mess and chaos that comes with horses and dogs – and, I’m sorry to say, the dogs are frequently to be found sleeping on my bed.’

In her West London office – painted a calming white, with a framed black and white photograph of her husband Nick and youngest daughter Bea – Chrissie is anxiously scanning a computer screen. Today she is signing off the autumn catalogue – the usual desirable mix of linens, homeware and clothes in cool, neutral colours – while simultaneously searching for a dress that her eldest daughter Ella can wear to her 18th birthday party. ‘She has turned down every single one,’ Chrissie says, leading me through to a quieter area in her office. ‘I thought I might be able to help…’

It’s this mix of commercial pressure and domestic drama – ‘a million little things every day’ – that is intriguing about Chrissie as the head of a business with an annual

Cosy throws, family photos, a candle burning… It’s all about a good life and memories