They're FINALLY here!!
And we're going to memorialise them forever!
Dear lovely friends!
Last Monday we did something I have been building towards for the best part of six months, and I am still slightly reeling from it. I have been longing to tell you properly, rather than in snatches, so here it is.
In this newsletter, I’ll be sharing:
The West Room, and what sixty years looks like
How we’re paying for it
If a scarf isn’t where you are right now
What happens next
One thing I’m saving for another day
Let’s dive in!
The West Room, and what sixty years looks like
If you missed the film, it’s here, and I would love you to watch it. In it I take you into the West Room, a bedroom at Mapperton that has not been touched in more than sixty years.
I want to be honest about what that actually means, because “not been touched” sounds rather romantic…and it isn’t.
The same curtains have hung at those windows since before the moon landing. They are bleached pale down one side where six decades of Dorset sun has got at them, and the pelmets are so water stained that you can hardly make out the lovely silk design.
There’s an 18th century daybed in the corner that nobody has sat on properly in living memory as the silk has shredded. The whole room has simply been waiting for somebody to say right, it’s your turn.
So it’s your turn.
If we raise the funds, the West Room gets hand-painted silk wallpaper. Damask blinds and upholstery, woven in England on looms that have been making cloth for centuries. Fresh paint. And that poor daybed reupholstered at last.
How we’re paying for it
I’ve spent months working with the wonderful designer Rory Hutton on a limited run silk scarf and pocket square, drawn entirely from Mapperton itself. Rory has created collections for the Royal Collection Trust, the V&A, Westminster Abbey and Highgrove, and I still can’t quite believe he said yes to us.
Look closely at the design and you’ll find twelve motifs hidden in it, one for every chapter of my life as the 12th Countess of Sandwich. There are peacocks. There’s Alberta Montagu’s House of Worth gown. There’s the tiara I wore at our wedding. And a Sandwich with a capital S, of course.
There’s even my pink swimming cap which I created myself (with the help of Rory ofc), which I’m told is now famous whether I like it or not.
Twelve motifs. Twelfth Countess. Neither of us noticed until the whole thing was finished!
Every penny of profit goes into that room.
And I should be clear about the scale of this, because I think it matters. We’re talking several hundred scarves, not thousands. This isn’t a run that quietly gets topped up when it sells out, and there is no second printing waiting in the wings. When they’ve gone, they’ve gone, and that really is the end of it.
If a scarf isn’t where you are right now
Quite a few of you have said, kindly and honestly, that it’s beyond what you can spend at the moment. I completely understand, and I would much rather you told me than quietly felt bad about it.
So there are smaller ways in, and they matter just as much:
$5: a personalised certificate saying you helped make it happen, framed by all twelve of Rory’s motifs
$25: the certificate, plus a digital wallpaper of the full scarf design for your phone and desktop
$50: the certificate, the wallpaper, and all twelve motifs as individual digital stickers
What happens next
I’m meeting the wallpaper studio, de Gournay, in September, and I fully expect to be useless for days afterwards from the sheer excitement of it.
The fabric people, Gainsborough Silks, are coming to Mapperton so we can go through samples together at the actual windows, in the actual light, which is the only sensible way to choose anything.
I’ll be filming all of it. The good decisions and the ones I change my mind about twice or even five times!
One thing I’m saving for another day
There is one more thing I’ve been holding back. Those old silk curtains aren’t going anywhere near a skip. They’re being given a second life as something rather lovely.
But that deserves its own newsletter, so I’ll tell you properly another time…
When the West Room is finished, one scarf will be framed and hung on its wall, permanently! So that when visitors stand in that room in 50 years’ time, the story they’re told isn’t only about the earls and countesses who slept there, or the families who’ve been here five hundred years.
It’s about the people who brought it back.
Thank you for being one of them!
With love and gratitude,
Julie x
