Surrey Homes | SH30 | April 2017 |Gardens supplement inside

This page: Adrian made the bedspread and cushions in the
master bedroom out of an old curtain of his mother’s
then explains the provenance of the slab of slate on top of
it.“My father found it in a wood near our house where I
grew up in Sidcup and it was just too good to leave there,
so every time we went for a walk he would drag it a few
more metres until finally he could collect it in the car. He
kept it for years and now it’s just perfect on top of this.”
And remember the Fortnum & Mason crate sitting
underneath the table? That’s a hint to Adrian’s current
life – he’s the in-house milliner in that most fabulous
of London retail institutions, the first they’ve had
working on the floor of the store since 1958.
Then taking it on again – a key to how he came to
have such an extraordinary job is sitting on top of the
slate worktop: a tea cosy made out of old ties.
“When we lived in Germany,” he explains, “I had a shop
called ‘Brit Bits’ selling bric-a-brac I would bring over from
England. I used to get bored sitting in there, so I got a sewing
machine and started making cushions. That led on to door
sausages and aprons and then I made some tea cosies out
of bits and pieces I had lying around. People would always
put them on their heads, so I started making hats…
“When I began to see people walking round the town
in them I thought maybe it was something I should follow
up… Really, it was a hobby which spiralled out of control.”
When Sven finished at university – he’s now the head of a
school languages department – they moved back to the UK
and Adrian enrolled to train as a milliner. When he’d finished
the course he went to see Philip Somerville, the Queen’s
milliner, to ask if he could do work experience with him.
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