Lawn

A poem about a garden.

The Atelier Collection comes out of a family history of textiles, and this was the release that started it, written after a poem by Vicci Bentley. A garden behind a window in early summer, the beds beyond it still soaked.

Bergamot cuts in cold and bright. Galbanum runs sappy underneath, the smell of a stem snapped in half. Patchouli keeps the ground wet, and tuberose and jasmine climb through as the sun burns the mist away.

A small shop on Columbia Road, leased in 1985 by a costume designer who began with potpourri and sold it into a street that fills with flowers every Sunday. The shop next door followed. Home blends came after that, then work made for skin, and the range now runs past forty individual blends.

Nothing is farmed out. A batch is developed, diluted and macerated in small quantities, left to mature, then filtered, bottled, labelled and packed inside the studio, with British craftspeople and long standing partners at the other end of it. Kate Evans has run the house since 2017, after nineteen years buying fashion for Harrods and Harvey Nichols, and the Atelier Collection is a separate line, drawn out of a family history of cloth. Velvet is knotted at every lid there by hand.