‘Never average, never ordinary’

VANESSA PRATT is pointing to her handiwork, with a touch of satisfaction in her voice.

“That’s our wall-paper up there, with the tea-stains. We were in here with the teabags and the water until late on Sunday night.”

Vanessa is part of the family behind the Avoca range, and we’re standing in the middle of their new boutique — a concession (the company’s first) on the second floor of Brown Thomas in Cork. The grand old store has seen a few famous brands come and go, and it’s probably fair to say that none of them have thrown tea on the walls before. Not on purpose, anyway. But this is Avoca, and Avoca do things differently.

“I suppose we have a very strong sense of what’s ok for us, and what isn’t,” says Vanessa’s sister Amanda Pratt, the creative director of the brand. “We don’t give in for commercial reasons. Products have to tick all of the boxes, aesthetic, quality, where its made — there’s a lot that comes into it.”

Amanda, like Vanessa and her other siblings Ivan and Simon, is both the inheritor of a family tradition, and an impressive innovator in her own right. Avoca was begun by her parents Donald and Hillary back in the 1970s, when they took a mad gamble and bought what was then just a hand-weaving company with a 17th century pedigree. Thirty years later and Avoca is a lifestyle and homewares behemoth selling everything from textiles to takeaway salads with ten stores all over Ireland and hundreds of stockists overseas.

The family run the business together, and their success is down to their shared business philosophy, which marries a genuine originality (‘trying to avoid the average and ordinary’ as the website says) with good old-fashioned elbow grease.

‘‘The one thing you do realise in business, is that there are no shortcuts. says Amanda. We’re mostly all exhausted all the time. But there’s a line in a movie; ‘If you build it, they will come’. And we tend to try to do the best we can do, and then hope people will recognise that it’s decent enough. That’s how we operate. We don’t begin with the end plan, we begin with the product, or with the idea, or with the service... And it’s worth it. Confucius said ‘do a job you love, and you never have to work a day again in your life.’ There’s no doubt but that I feel like that. Yesterday, I was here in my office for 12 hours, but it demands that of you. You have to be prepared to put it in.”

Her sister is prepared to put the hours in. When we meet in Brown Thomas, the Avoca boutique is open for its first proper day of trading in Cork, and Vanessa and her team have been working for two days straight. The fruits of their labour are impressive. If it fails to thrive it will not be due to a lack of attention to detail.

This little corner of Avoca is dripping with atmosphere. Literally, thanks to the tea-stains. Rivers of brown wash down the lovely old patterned wallpaper which has been used to transform an area that once sold suitcases. The paper is ripped and faded and goes perfectly with a gorgeous jumble of furniture displaying the various wares. Antique wardrobes overflow with throws and textiles, dining tables are bowed under the weight of cake stands, various bureaux are bedecked with legions of scented candles, and towering above it all, snakes a mass of old-fashioned lampshades twined together in an arresting light display.

This Brown Thomas boutique is another example of that Avoca aesthetic that has become instantly recognisable to Irish shoppers in the last few years. Two parts Granny’s boudoir and one part Mad Hatters tea party, it’s charmingly idiosyncratic and also soothing, somehow. You can’t help thinking; nothing bad ever happened in an Avoca space.

Fans of the brand adore it, and it’s a look that’s been strong enough to turn Avoca into one of the trailblazers in the Irish homewares industry. An industry they’ve had a hand in growing from scratch, arguably. So au fait are we all now with our hipster flat-packs from Ikea and wall-to-wall Ligne Rose that it’s easy to forget that up until about 20 years ago, brown mixing bowls and pictures of the Sacred Heart were the main accents in Irish interiors.

Amanda Pratt remembers getting started in a design wasteland. “You’d travel over to London, or Paris and restaurants were full of really interesting chairs, and things. And here, if you went to the people who catered for pubs and restaurants, it was really old fashioned stuff. Nobody was thinking about aesthetics. And now it’s all changed completely. If you look at the way Irish men dress now, compared to the way they dressed when I was a kid, there’s such a freedom there.”

It’s not surprising though, says Amanda, that we’ve come relatively late to an appreciation of homewares. We had poverty to contend with, for one thing. “As a nation, we have not put much by aesthetics. I’ve always thought that our history of aesthetics is based around things that didn’t cost us anything. The things we got involved in were things that didn’t cost us any money: music and song, and dance, and storytelling and conversation and poetry. I feel our culture is very much around those verbal and community communications. But there’s been a huge awakening here, and an interest over the last decade in terms of what is aesthetically beautiful.”

Loathe as one is to cast a shadow over the inherently sunny brand of Avoca, you have to ask; how are they weathering the change in climate, economically?

“Firstly the board all took a 20% pay cut. Then we just set about looking at every single part of the business, forensically going through everything, and where there was any fat to be cut, we just had to cut it. We had to take very hard decisions, but I feel we’re very fortunate that it’s worked so far.”

There may be even better news on the horizon. “There’s one very big thing that I’m very excited about,” says Amanda. “But I don’t know whether it will come off or not. There’s a Japanese company called Itochu. They brought Paul Smith, Vivienne Westwood, Katherine Hamnett and Georgio Armani to Japan, and they have asked us could they bring Avoca retail to Japan. I don’t know what’s going to happen, and it might easily not happen, but they were here last month, and they’re coming over again this month.”

As to the finer details of a possible deal, Amanda happily admits she has ‘literally not an idea in the world’. “They really like what they see here in Avoca, and it does seem to be getting more serious.”

Who knows is all she can say right now. It’s early days still, but there may be some very big things in the offing for one of Ireland’s favourite companies. Amanda Pratt is hopeful, a very Avoca thing to be.