It’s early Saturday evening and having spent the last few hours painting our bathroom, I’m rewarding myself by writing this Substack piece whilst sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea and a bar of left-over Christmas chocolate in hand. As it happens, the colour scheme of our bathroom (or more specifically the skirting boards) is very much inspired by the creative, Katie Brigstock, who we’re spotlighting today. The eagle-eyed might recognise parts of this piece as we featured Katie in our first issue of our printed journal. Since publishing that piece, Katie has made a big announcement and so it felt fitting to revisit this piece, adding parts of our conversation that we couldn't quite squeeze into our printed journal and cheering her on to the next chapter in her career.
Before we get into the piece, I am shamelessly going to plug our latest printed journal (Dulcify Journal: Issue 02) which is available to buy from our website. And if you’ve found your way here but are yet to subscribe, you can do so by following the link here:
One of the things I love most about creating a printed journal is that it acts as a record - it captures a snapshot in time of creative’s lives, their passions and their projects. When we spoke with Katie in 2022, she had recently opened her physical shop, Style Your Spaces, which sits on Howe Street. This week Katie announced that she’s made the decision to close her bricks and mortar shop at the end of the month and will be selling all remaining stock between the 18th-21st January and the 25th-28th January. Closing up shop will allow Katie to spend more time with her little one (a new addition to the family since we spoke in 2022), launch a new online store and work on some other big plans. Although it’s sad to see such a beautiful shop close, it’s hugely exciting to see what Katie might do next! Here’s a look-back at our conversation from year before last.
Setting up shop
(Conversation from Summer 2022)
Tell me about your journey to setting up Style Your Spaces.
So the short version of the long story is that I started as a food stylist. I’d always been really into food and styling and while I was at university in Edinburgh, I started putting aside a day a week dedicated to making something, taking photos of it and sharing it on my blog. From there, I went to work for Waitrose during the summer holidays as an in-house food stylist. When I finished university, I went to train as a yoga teacher which is a totally different version of my life and then I went to Leiths School of Food and Wine.
I’d always talked about going to Leiths - I almost went to Leiths rather than going to uni. I studied Spanish and Politics and I found the course really hard apart from my third year which I spent in Madrid and worked for a restaurant PR agency - they only did Michelin star restaurants and it was mega. When I left Leiths, I teamed up with a good friend of mine who had just finished training at Le Cordon Bleu - together we started We are Cook and Baker. We really wanted to have a go at styled supper clubs and so we tried it and it sort of blew up before we had a chance to properly think about it. For two years we cooked all the food, styled supper clubs in very different spaces - warehouses, photography studios, restaurants. Every element of the supper club would be styled - we’d have ceramists design specific items and the menu was themed around the country or the place. From there, we worked with more corporate brands and did talks and demos - stuff that we never thought we could do. I often wonder what it would be like now if we’d carried it on but we didn’t have the infrastructure to continue.
After that, I taught yoga for 6 months in Bristol and then I ended up being recruited for a job back up here at Ballintaggart. A year later I took the leap and opened Style Your Spaces.
What have you learnt about setting up your own space?
It’s very hard to know how people will move around a space, until they come into it and to know what they are drawn too. What I’m selling is very visual and so I wanted to make the space feel a bit more like a styled room rather than a shop. I didn’t want it to feel too overwhelming with loads of things on display. I purposely chose to bring in more homely pieces of furniture rather than shop-display units, utilise soft lighting where I can and to have a green-striped curtain behind the till. Painting the skirting boards a different colour to the walls is also something I do at home and wanted to bring into the shop.
The manufacturing side of things has been such a learning curve, all the endless new regulations, taxes and the odd items being delivered to the shop broken – that’s the less glamorous side of running a business that no-one else sees!
What do you want people to feel when they step into your shop?
Inspired is the main thing, even when people don’t buy anything but they come in and get a feel for different objects and displays. There’s something very special about having a physical, tactile store. A lot of our stock is made by small brands and sometimes it’s difficult to get across all the fine details of their work online.
Do you have mood-boards for the store?
In the back of my mind, I always have an idea of what I want the whole store to feel like and that probably does inform my choices when I’m picking things. There’s a couple of colours that I don’t pick, which is a personal choice and sometimes I have to remind myself that I can’t make the entire shop green and blue even though I love it and that I need to pick things for other people too! I think that’s something I’m still learning.
Can you tell us about how you curate the stock in Style Your Spaces?
About 40% of the stock are items that I’ve designed and had made, and the rest are pieces I’ve sourced from small artists from across the UK (and beyond). Many things in here are from small brands that have never done wholesale before. To begin with, it was me reaching out to people but now that the shop is becoming more established, I have people approaching me, which is great because then I get to discover people who I might not have come across otherwise.
How would you describe your personal style?
Whenever I have to describe it, I say imaginative interior design but I don’t know. I’m not scared of colour and I like fabrics but I wouldn’t say I’m a maximalist. I like a mixture of beautiful antique furniture with more modern colours.
Favourite food memory?
Grandma’s trifle. It was epic, it had 2 bottles of whatever alcohol she could find. My grandma was quite old and quite blind and would just chuck so much of it in. One of my happiest memories though, was toasting crumpets with my Grandma over her fire on these long metal forks. She had an old-school silver serving dish and she’d put half a block of butter on them and just let them melt. That was amazing. I still like crumpets now.
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