News

It’s the ambition of many an independent business to get themselves a bricks and mortar premises, especially if you’re in retail; it’s somewhere people can walk into, sit down in, somewhere you can hang things from the walls, where they can be picked up and examined. Something concrete to make it all seem a bit more real. And there’s no shop window like a… shop window.

Brighton-based designer Susannah Dowse has achieved her ambition with the help of interiors people Baines & Fricker, combining her creative studio with a shop sellingDowse jewellery as well as gift products from other local and national artisans. We’ve long been fans of husband and wife duo Steve Baines and Eliza Fricker, and the couple’s signature style is writ large, although subtly, across the shop in the Hove area. Their clean fresh wood furniture and fixtures provide a perfectly pale display environment, the hand drawn designs of their wallpaper and prints are inventive, and of course there’s a B&F fruit crate tucked away somewhere. As Susannah herself says, it’s nice to see something on the high street that’s not a café or a boarded up video shop, and her first retail outlet is a particularly welcome addition to Brighton’s.