because it’s your house, your family, your kids.” “That you can have wrinkles and puckers and your cabbage roses can be tea-stained, and it’s O.K. to be slightly messy,” said Marian McEvoy, a former editor in chief of Elle Décor and House Beautiful. Ashwell’s Santa Monica storefront was still available, so technically only two of the three “new” stores would be housed in new real estate.Īll of which prompts the question: what are the chances that a new business whose product and gestalt are based on a rather old that is to say, two decades old idea might find success in a still-punishing retail environment? To put it another way, does the big white couch still have legs? So little time had elapsed between the liquidation and this ramping up that Ms. And so it was that last month she found herself hurtling between New York, her home in Santa Monica and London, stocking three new stores with the chipped white furniture and blowsy upholstered pieces that had long been her trademark.
Ashwell almost exclusively favors was courted by a new partnership. The woman who had made unlikely stars out of a giant squashy sofa and a baggy white slipcover the decorating equivalent of a peasant blouse and worn jeans, a sartorial style that the very English Ms. Afterward, she imagined she would be taking a well-deserved, if not exactly planned-for, rest. Ashwell, who had just turned 50 and had already been blown sideways by the recent death of her mother, was soon presiding over the liquidation of 15 stores and the dismissal of her hand-picked teams of upholsterers and sewers, designers and salespeople. So when Shabby Chic filed for bankruptcy last January after nearly 20 years in business, its creator, Rachel Ashwell, felt both anguish and humiliation, not to mention flat-out exhaustion. IT was a look and a phrase that defined a generation of living rooms, and spawned an industry of knock-offs.
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