Material matters: two unique shops in Rye, created around one very personal vision

“To me, crafting a home is all about time,” says Merchant & Mills co-founder Carolyn Denham. “You add layers to it over many years. Like with clothing, you will suddenly be drawn to a particular textile or a piece of furniture and that passion may fluctuate, but it becomes part of your history, and if you’ve bought – or made – the best one you could, it will remain relevant. A home should tell a story.”

Carolyn teamed up with her partner, the photographer Roderick Field, to launch Merchant & Mills in Herefordshire in 2010 to sell beautiful, natural textiles and timeless clothing patterns that would encourage a new generation of people to make their own garments, moving the business to Rye in East Sussex in 2012. Her latest baby, however, is House: a destination for interiors inside the cluster of period buildings that adjoin the George Hotel, just off the town’s high street. House is a rich source of blankets, cushions, throws and lampshades that are ready to take home, as well as inspiration for makers, who can buy fabrics via Merchant & Mills and follow House’s pattern book to create their own pieces.

Textiles have been the backdrop to Carolyn’s life from the start. “My mum was a great seamstress, so I learned to sew as soon as I could hold a needle and thread,” she says. She made her own clothes while at school in the 1980s, “bonkers pieces inspired by uniforms” and that same workwear spirit – minus the bonkers part – has been a mainstay of clothing patterns at Merchant & Mills over the last 15 years, though the company’s textiles have become richer in colour, pattern and embellishment in recent times.

Carolyn’s mother would also buy scraps of William Morris fabrics to make curtains and cushions for their home in a small village in Yorkshire, which rubbed off on her daughter. “I went through a big loose cover-making moment,” she says, referring to the interiors of her 19th-century home in nearby Romney Marsh, which is swathed in earthy, natural fabrics from Merchant & Mills and beyond, much of it crafted by her own hands.

Carolyn studied fashion design at Newcastle Polytechnic and went to work for a fashion studio in Italy but quickly became disenchanted with the industry. “I realised that I’m a maker not a designer,” she says. “I need to be hands on.” She formulated the idea for Merchant & Mills on returning to the UK. “My aim was to elevate the craft of sewing, which was often dismissed as a hobby for housewives, and give it the same gravitas as being a cabinet maker, for example. I wanted to encourage people to slow down, take their time and make things with as much care as they possibly could.”

But the voices of the naysayers were loud. “People asked me if I’d lost my mind. They said that nobody sews or owns a sewing machine anymore,” she explains. So she changed tack and went to work for a print company making wallpapers and fabrics, before managing an interior design practice for a few years.

It took a life-threatening illness to shift her thinking. Aged 43, Carolyn needed brain surgery and was only given a 30 per cent chance of pulling through OK. “I sat for 30 minutes in a cold waiting room and thought to myself, you’ve done well but you haven’t shone in the way that you’ve always had the ambition to. You need to honour yourself and do what you really want to do.”

By 2009, people were still “passionate in their discouragement”, as she puts it, but she was undaunted. “The idea wasn’t just about good design, making things well and using natural fabrics, it was also about the removal from everyday life you get from making,” says Carolyn, who has often spoken about how sewing has been a salve to her own mental health. “Your mind goes quiet while you fixate on a buttonhole. I wanted to share that with people.”

Carolyn and Roderick began Merchant & Mills in 2010, with the former establishing the relationships with textile mills and designing the patterns, and the latter masterminding the brand identity and photo shoots. They quickly captured people’s attention, proving the naysayers wrong and outgrowing their home in Staunton on Wye. They moved to East Sussex to be close to Roderick’s daughters two years later, commandeering an old toy factory in Rye for Merchant & Mills, which now houses their shop, warehouse and sewing school – a destination for fabric lovers across the country and abroad.

The company also recently bought and renovated an 1890s townhouse in Rye to house guests of its residential sewing retreats and “immerse them in the Merchant & Mills world,” as Carolyn puts it. “The Grove” is dressed in a wide array of textiles: window drapes are made from scraps of Indian cotton inspired by the Korean patchwork tradition of pojagi, while Indian kantha stitching adds embellishment to cushions, bedspreads and rugs. 

“We began by thinking to ourselves, what techniques can we use that will be achievable for somebody working from home and what exciting details can we add?” she explains. “We wanted to bring our designs to people who would never make their own clothes but might make a cushion or a bolster.” Creating the interiors of The Grove inspired them to launch House, as well as distill their designs into a pattern book for others to follow, adding new layers to their own homes. To give people a further nudge in the right direction, Merchant & Mills offers courses in cushion-making and French mattress making. “They’re a great way to introduce people to sewing,” she adds.

Carolyn and her team have dug into their 15-year archive of textile designs for House, adding new colours and details, as well as creating fresh designs. “We have developed long-standing relationships with just a handful of mills in the UK, Europe, India and Japan, which has allowed us to be very specific about what we want – asking for things like low impact dyes, organic bases and extra embellishments – and we know they can deliver the right standard,” she says.

A subtle boldness is pepping up Merchant & Mills’ classic utilitarian look. A peekaboo cushion has a sudden flash of red, for example, and there’s a strong stripe and check game playing out across bedspreads and throws. “I have a talented team of textile designers who are adding their own style to my pared-back aesthetic, pushing us in new directions,” Carolyn adds.