Six years ago, Amanda Brooks resigned as the fashion director of Barney’s New York to move to a farmhouse in the Cotswolds, and began to think about what to do next. She was doing a lot already—raising her young family while writing two memoirs in the garden shed—but as Brooks describes it, she started to feel restless. "I’d learned to make jam, I’d been horse riding…but I felt like just living the country lifestyle wouldn’t be my future,” she said.
When the elegant octogenarian owner of Brooks's local greengrocer in Stow-on-the-Wold mentioned that she was looking for a tenant to share the 16th-century retail space, “things just started falling into place,” says Brooks. It took a year to negotiate the lease, and a further five months to renovate Cutter Brooks, which involved restoring the weathered oak beams in the ceiling and covering the walls with shell-pink plaster. While the paint dried, Brooks took to the road and filled suitcases with hand-painted crockery from Seville and feather-light Parisian lingerie. Though the inspiration for Cutter Brooks is English country life, the inventory is largely from continental Europe and the United States—a deliberate choice in order to offer British customers products they won’t find elsewhere.
As we walk past baskets of vintage fabric scrunchies from Copenhagen and prairie-style dresses, Brooks and I stop to run our hands over a blue-and-white 19th-century American quilt, sourced by an antique textile dealer in Maryland, and through a rack of gauzy, high-necked, deceptively demure nightgowns from Florentine designer Loretta Caponi. The air smells of wood smoke and myrrh—the work of an Astier de Villatte candle (“Delhi”). It’s an inviting, cluttered space, stuffed with far-flung goodies that reflect the magpie tastes of its curator. I ask about personal favorites, and Brooks steps toward a trestle table set for six.
“These,” she says, and hands over an exquisite sculpture of lily of the valley, one of two acting as centerpieces, made by the New Jersey-based artist Vladimir Kanevsky. Next to the table is a bookshelf full of hand blocked, quilted placemats and matching cloth napkins (“our best-selling products in terms of volume”) from Zojora, a Singapore-based shop whose designers text Brooks photos of the prints they find on scouting trips to India. Another treasured line is the series of decoupage envelope boxes and letter holders made by Scanlon Apparati in Switzerland, whose owner, Beth, found Brooks on Instagram and felt inspired to get in touch. One of the letter holders includes an illustration of Juice, a black sheep who lives on the Brooks’s family farm.
In her office at the back of the store, overlooking a garden of faded hollyhocks, Brooks reviews orders and talks about the difficulty of keeping enough stock. Her customers—“every different type of person. A lot of American tourists this time of year”—are buying up John Derian platters and woven water bottle covers from Marrakech faster than they can be shipped, and it looks like she might need to close on Friday to take a breather. What will she do with the day off? Brooks grins. “Maybe I’ll make jam.”
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