MY FAMILY & OTHER ANIMALS
Looking for a new direction, Michaela Corrie and her mother embarked upon a project that would end up changing both of their lives
Setting up their distinctive textile business has been a life-changing project for a mother and daughter
CAN YOU SEE THE COW? It’s a question Michaela Corrie never tires of overhearing when she’s showing her textiles and furnishings at interior design shows. At first glimpse, her signature fabric – navy and cream on heavy linen-union cloth – is an on-trend geometric print. Some people see butterflies; others mistletoe. But look closer (and most viewers need to be prompted) and you’ll spot cows’ heads arranged in groups of four, like petals round a flower.
“It’s a classic circles-and-diamonds pattern,” says Michaela, a graphic designer whose first fabric was inspired by cows grazing on her neighbour’s farm in Cumbria’s Eden Valley. “I could never design a floral chintz – I’m too constrained by my love of symmetry.”
Michaela’s graphic eye is perfectly balanced by the creative talents and intuitive approach of her business partner, Lesley Elston. The daughter of a court dressmaker who worked on Wallis Simpson’s wedding dress, Lesley is a skilled needleworker with a flair for colour and a penchant for luxurious textures. She’s also Michaela’s mother, which is how she gets away with teasing her for being unable to sew on a button (for the record, Michaela denies this).
It is less than two years since the pair launched Cabbage & Curtainrail, the made-in-cumbria fabric-and-furnishings brand they created in memory of Michaela’s late father, Peter. Yet they have already caught the eye of investors and international designers with their contemporary animal prints. As well as her cow motif, there’s a diamond design based on minimalist sheep, a dotty arrangement of ewes’ heads and an elegant interplay of elongated pheasants. “Different colourways change them completely,” says Lesley, who loves grey and lime, while her daughter favours olive and red. “I’m more classic and avoid what’s fashionable,” Michaela says. “But Mum reminds me we’re not designing it for ourselves.”
Cabbage and Curtainrail were two donkeys whose adventures made up the childhood bedtime stories told by her father. “He was eccentric, and we were very close,” says Michaela, the middle
child between two brothers. “We never knew how he came up with the names. They lived in our airing cupboard and had to go to bed safe at the end of the day. Dad often fell asleep before the end of the story and I’d have to yell for Mum to come and get him.” Peter died of chronic asthma in 2010 – a month later, the house he’d shared with Lesley was burgled. “Mum had a bit of a breakdown after that, so moved in with us,” Michaela remembers. During the seven months in which Lesley lived with her daughter, the women talked about going into business: “We needed to do something positive to take Mum in a new direction. One night I sat bolt upright in bed, thinking: ‘Whatever we do, it has to be called Cabbage and Curtainrail!’”
Lesley was already making cushions and homeware, and selling them at local craft fairs. Michaela’s sense of pattern gave them an edge: “Everyone was doing pinnies, pegbags and doorstops, but we used luxurious trims and contrasting fabrics.” However, they soon found themselves unable to fulfil repeat orders because they couldn’t reliably source materials. “In the fabric world, patterns change every season and no one has any old stock,” Michaela says. “But when someone tells me I can’t do something, it makes me even more determined, so thought I’d create some myself.”
A graphic designer since the age of 16 – she started work in her family’s Carlisle printing firm and has been self-employed since her twenties – Michaela started playing around with patterns: “One evening, I was doodling on my ipad and came up with a cow’s head. I flipped it, then flipped it again, and was struck by
how it worked.” Knowing that the Cumbrian setting was a selling point, she wanted to reflect the rural environment yet avoid being twee or ornate, so spent a week perfecting Cumberland Cow: the ‘crisp’ monochrome cow’s head repeated in a circular pattern: “I noticed that I couldn’t see the cow any more and realised that was our USP.”
Inspired by the pheasants that roam the Corby Castle estate, near Carlisle, on which she rents a cottage with her husband Andrew and daughters Phoebe, 11, and Scarlett, eight, Michaela set to work on the elegant Pheasant & Feather design, then completed her collection with Cumbrian Sheep, a more abstract pattern. Next, they contacted Stead Mcalpin, a local textileprinting firm with a 175-year history (it made fabrics for Queen Victoria and helped furnish the Titanic). “We booked a colouration session in their digital studio,” Lesley remembers. “When the designer showed us each pattern in different colours, we were amazed.” They paid to get a few rolls of linen union printed, and converted a spare room at Lesley’s house into a sewing room. “Mum would work into the wee hours to make cushions, while I taught myself how to build a website,” Michaela says. When they launched Cabbage & Curtainrail – on a limited budget – at
a show near Penrith in the spring of 2015, the response was overwhelming. “We had Mum’s cushions, and Dad’s old armchair upholstered in our fabric as a centrepiece, but to save money we’d printed our designs on paper and displayed them as posters. People kept asking where they could buy our ‘wallpaper’.”
Nearly two years on, the buzz created by that first show is growing into a roar. Last spring, when they exhibited at a London trade show, one high-end designer, upon seeing the subliminal cows and sheep, was heard to exclaim, “We’re done with flamingoes and palm trees.” Encouraged, Michaela then fired off the email that changed their lives: “I sent an introductory letter to the owner of Stead Mcalpin, not expecting to get a reply. A month later we were invited to see them and haven’t looked back since.”
That Dragon’s Den-style meeting resulted in the company going into partnership with Cabbage & Curtainrail Ltd, so Michaela and Lesley can concentrate on new products and designs – watch this space for dogs, deer and a golden plover – without worrying about how they’re going to finance their next print run. “We’ve been fast-forwarded a thousand steps,” says Michaela, who’s spent the past two months showing their Cumbrian pattern book at fabric fairs in Frankfurt and North Carolina. “It blows my mind that all this has come from a doodle. If Dad was here, he’d be thrilled.”
For more information and to buy online, visit cabbageandcurtainrail.co.uk.