We need real businesses, not token ones, and to support these you need locals
and visitors.”
It was Mercer’s idea to harness the fashionable energy of the surrounding
community towards something that could help the town, in the guise of the
Painswick Wearable Art Festival. Conceived to be for fashion what Hay-on-Wye
is for books, the event, which is essentially a costume-making competition,
immediately attracted a glitzy rabble of big players. Sculptor Dan Chadwick
and designer Selina Blow signed up as judges, and Keith Allen was drafted in
as compère. More than 1,000 people attended the inaugural event last year,
which had 28 entries. By the time Painswick put on its glad rags for a
second year, Plum Sykes was patron, with Lulu Guinness, Savannah (sister of
Sienna) Miller, milliner Stephen Jones, Dan Chadwick, Selina Blow and
brother Detmar and artist Grayson Perry as her team. There were 70 wearable
entries and nearly five thousand visitors.
“We’ve heard that lots of people are already inviting their friends for next
year,” says Mercer, who hopes to expand the competition to stretch over two
days, and envisages a permanent Wearable Arts Museum in the town.
Among those in the vanguard of Painswick’s reawakening is the floral-print
impresario Cath Kidston. Legend has it the local flea markets first inspired
her to set up shop in Clarendon Cross in London in 1993, years before her
brand achieved globe-straddling domination. “She re-covered and painted some
chairs she found in a Painswick market,” says Dalrymple Hamilton. “That’s
how the whole thing started.”
Her home of the past 12 years, Trillgate Farm in the Slad Valley near Stroud –
where Lily Allen lives – is proof, if you needed it, that Kidston’s style
was born in this part of the world. The 17th-century stone house, with
mullion windows and flagstone floors, is bursting with paraphernalia found
at car boot sales and markets. “We decorated it in quite a low-key way,” she
says. “I like plain walls in lighter colours, with complementing florals.
Upstairs there are a lot of Cath Kidston fabrics, vintage finds and an
antique four-poster bed which my sister lent to me.”
But now Kidston and her husband, music producer Hugh Padgham, have sold up and
are moving closer to Painswick – to nearby Paradise Valley, so-called by
Charles II, who was overcome by its beauty. Unsurprisingly, given Britain’s
love for anything made by Cath Kidston, Trillgate Farm was snapped up in a
flash, even with a list price of £1.75 million.
Her new place is a Georgian house, which anticipates a departure from her
country-cottage style. “I don’t know why but I’ve always hankered after a
big, airy house with high ceilings and sash windows,” she says. “Perhaps
it’s because I’m tall, so I bump my head on low doorways. I’d given up hope
of finding a house like this in the Cotswolds.”
All of Painswick is something of an architectural anomaly. The streets are
lined with large limestone buildings, built in the 17th century by wool
merchants competing to own the grandest house in town. But Kidston also
likes the shops. The inclusion in her new catalogue for the Japanese market
– her latest conquest – of Kate Rich, a collectables shop in Painswick, is a
giveaway. Her ideal Saturday is spent hunting out bargains at local markets,
and she appreciates that the area isn’t “filled with smart shops selling
useless things.”
This might be one reason why house prices in the area remain lower than the
more discovered parts of the Cotswolds. As Rob Jones-Davies, a buying agent
from Middleton Advisors, puts it: “You get more brick for your buck in and
around Painswick.” While large valley houses, such as Kidston’s, tend to
sell for more than £1.5 million, cottages in the town can cost less than
£400,000. “The same money can buy you 25 per cent more space than you’d get
in the prime weekending territory of the Burford-Stow-Chipping Norton
triangle,” Jones-Davies adds.
As well as its traditional charms – a picturesque church, bowling green and
Britain’s oldest post office among them – Painswick has practical
attractions. There is a good local primary school in the town, and two
grammar schools are only three miles away at Stroud.
All of these factors seem to be doing the trick in terms of attracting
interest. At the Wearable Art Festival, visitors from London were impressed.
“I spent most of the day trying to download the Hamptons app on to my
iPhone,” said one. “We saw two or three houses for sale which looked divine
and seemed, from a Putney perspective, cheap.”
Residents, celebrity and non-celebrity alike, agree that the town is buzzing.
“Painswick’s totally woken up,” says Emma Samms, star of Dynasty and a
Cotswolds resident. “Locals have now raised their heads above the parapet.
The town’s become more diverse.”
Business is thriving, too. Joining the famous fabric shop and award-winning
delicatessen, over the next few months there will be a new bakery and a
re-opened library, as well as a local pub, the Falcon, refreshed by new
owners.
“I expect prices to go up in the year to come,” says Jones-Davies. “Painswick,
and the outlying villages of Miserden and Edgeworth, are becoming a golden
triangle in their own right.”
Beaconsfield House, Painswick
An enormous Grade II-listed family house in the heart of town, with large
kitchen, five bedrooms and landscaped gardens. £825,000 from Savills (01242
548 000).
The Old Bakery, Painswick
The Chairman is selling up (see story). An 18th-century listed four-bedroom
house, with shop below and a large garden. £895,000 from Jackson-Stops
Staff (01993 822 661).
Jasmine Cottage Painswick
A 15th-century semi-detached cottage with William Mary stone fireplace in
the dining room and an open fire in the sitting room. Four bedrooms, garage,
cellar and courtyard garden. £300,000 from Hamptons (01452 812 354).