CUTTER BROOKS

The Magpie Makings of Amanda Brooks’s New Cotswolds Shop

"Six years ago, Amanda Brooks resigned as the fashion director of Barney’s New York to move to a farmhouse in the Cotswolds, and began to think about what to do next. She was doing a lot already—raising her young family while writing two memoirs in the garden shed—but as Brooks describes it, she started to feel restless. 'I’d learned to make jam, I’d been horse riding…but I felt like just living the country lifestyle wouldn’t be my future,' she said. When the elegant octogenarian owner of Brooks's local greengrocer mentioned that she was looking for a tenant to share the 16th-century retail space, 'things just started falling into place,' says Brooks. It took a year to negotiate the lease, and a further five months to renovate Cutter Brooks, which involved restoring the weathered oak beams in the ceiling and covering the walls with shell-pink plaster. While the paint dried, Brooks took to the road and filled suitcases with hand-painted crockery from Seville and feather-light Parisian lingerie. Though the inspiration for Cutter Brooks is English country life, the inventory is largely from continental Europe and the United States—a deliberate choice in order to offer British customers products they won’t find elsewhere."