Beach essentials like a leather-wrapped cooler
A Hadley Freeman tweet alerted me to new news from Gwyneth Paltrow.
Gwyneth's store is inspired by "a general store in an English seaside town where you can buy everything from stamps to ice cream." A Spar?
— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) August 4, 2017
It has the "vibe" of a room in an English house where you "kick off your wellies and store your gardening tools" https://t.co/edGZaokhXJ
— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) August 4, 2017
To Architectural Digest we go, to drink our fill of this luxurious general store with its straw hats on the wall.
Gwyneth Paltrow and the Hamptons go together like a Hans Wegner chair in a Scandinavian-style home. That’s why Paltrow, who has a home in Amagansett, finally decided to bring her signature Goop Mrkt out East, and it’s not your typical polished Hamptons boutique. Tucked inside a 20th-century cottage, the store is more like a chic general shop you would find in an English seaside town, which is exactly the look Paltrow wanted to achieve when she enlisted former Soho House designer Vicky Charles, of Charles & Co., to reimagine the landmarked property.
People replying to Freeman’s tweet are providing poignant details of the chic general shop you would find in an English seaside town: the stale cakes, the Fray Bentos tinned steak and kidney pie, the three day old sausage rolls under a heat lamp by the till, the combination of scratch cards, cheap strong lager and dusty tins of Tyne brand beef curry.
For the benefit of @gorskon & other US readers, this is what an actual English seaside town "general store" looks like. pic.twitter.com/dvEkrroMP1
— Val Dobson (@ValDobson) August 4, 2017
Ah the olde worlde charme.
Goop’s own products, curated specifically for the Hamptons lifestyle, create an extra layer of contemporary. In the “mudroom,” guests are greeted with herb bundles hanging from the wall; beach essentials, like a leather-wrapped cooler from Jayson Home; and gardening supplies, including a brass mister and Womanswork gloves. “This particular space was inspired by a room in an English cottage, where you can just kick off your wellies and store your gardening tools,” says Brittany Pattner, Goop’s creative director.
Other items are more farm-focused, such as tomatoes grown from the outdoor garden and fresh-baked bread from Eli Zabar, which will be delivered daily. “It’s all about the easy, breezy life you live out here,” says Pattner. “We wanted to create a really holistic experience of not only curating products, but also providing the right context for those items.” Mission accomplished.
It’s curated specifically for the Hamptons lifestyle.
Funny, but I feel like all the attention Goop gets only helps them. Couldn’t we all just tell Goop and Gwyneth to fuck off already?
Can we please ban the use of ‘curated’ for anything not in a museum?
@Bruce Coppola
Or art gallery.
Aw, no, I’m sorry, I can’t give up making fun of Goop. I mean if you could actually show me I was sending customers their way I would, but short of that…I just can’t. [sobs gently]
@Ophelia Everyone needs a hobby I guess ;-)
No amount of goop and trendy junk in some seaside hideaway trying to rival Blackpool could erase from my mind Gwyneth’s stunning rendition of the lady Viola de Lesseps in John Madden’s Academy Award winning classic ‘Shakespeare in Love’.
Well, perhaps I exaggerate. If Gwyneth found herself a derelict builder’s yard in Kathmandu, and gave it a makeover featuring a mountain of goop rivalling the nearby Mt Everest, then perhaps I would concede that her critics might have a point.
But by that time; who knows? The town’s elders might have met and decided to rename the town ‘Goophmandu’.
Gardening gloves, fresh-baked bread, herb bundles hanging from whitewashed walls — and above all natural, simple remedies handed down from woman to woman for many generations. It’s playing peasant. Marie Antoinette and her noble ladies dressing up like milk maids. Oh, how charming.
Actual peasants and actual milk maids were a hell of a lot dirtier and, one hopes, a lot more practical when it came to the gentry pretending to be twee, fey little versions of physicians.
Exactly. Straw hats on the wall, only $250 dollars apiece.
Just a picture of “a general store in [my local] English seaside town where you can buy everything from stamps to ice cream.”
The picture quality is fine, by the way, that is the genuine resolution of the shop. Which was recently caught selling booze to kids, as it happens.
I don’t think I’ll explain to the good people of Redcar that the one thing they really need is a leather-wrapped cooler. I think they’d probably argue that what they really need is for successive governments to not shut down every industry that has a fleeting chance of providing them with jobs. But what do they know, they’re not even movie stars.
Errr… That’s what we call a shed. And it’s not a room in a cottage, it’s a separate brick or timber structure. You might bring your wellies into the house but they’d be kicked off in the kitchen, or utility room, should you have one. And you wouldn’t store your gardening tools there. If you’re a gardener you usually have a shed or an outside lockbox to keep them in. Not in the house – they’re mucky and take up way too much room, not to mention being dangerous to leave lying around. Ever stood on a rake’s tines and had a first hand lesson in the principles of leverage?
Even historically this is wrong. There was never a pretty little general goods store in a village – I don’t know if they existed in American (very) small towns. In a traditional village you had: a pub (most important), a church, a greengrocer, a butcher/fishmonger, and a baker. Specialist jobs which have been overtaken by modern life and replaced with local mini marts which have a limited stock and have to charge the earth for everything to make a living. Most people do their shopping at the big out-of-town retail parks which all have a big supermarket where you can get a large variety of goods at a much cheaper price.
Small towns may have a chain minimart – like Spar, which is still comparatively expensive – or, increasingly, a small outlet for one of the larger chain supermarkets – a Tesco Metro, a Sainsbury’s Local etc. While there are issues with these – undercutting local businesses and driving them under, land banking etc – they at least mean locals can buy a loaf of bread without taking out a mortgage and not find it to be stale when they get it home…
I’m pretty sure they have in mind a mythic, fictional England – just slightly more commercialized than Narnia.
@ Jeff Engel It reminds me of Poundbury. Maybe that’s where they got the idea. But even Poundbury has a Waitrose, I think.
Our village has not one but two general stores, one chain, one independent and they are both perfectly nice. It needs to be noted, however, that these are places you run out to if you need some emergency hobnobs or washing powder, not for browsing – enchanted – for leather-wrapped fucking coolers or idiotically-priced straw hats.
I don’t think Paltrow’s show would go down very well in the rural North East of England.
Ugh, that’s “shop”, not “show”.
@Steamshovelmama
I hadn’t heard of ‘mud rooms’ until they seemed to start being a thing in America. The idea that there could be a *whole room* for taking off your boots seems decidedly un-British. If we British have a (downstairs) room that isn’t being used for anything else, we’ll damn well make it into an extra sitting/living room, only ever to be used on special occasions. Absolutely nobody knows why.
Don’t forget the ironmonger. It was great having a place you could go to and describe a vague need with much waving of hands and the shopkeeper would go and look in the back for ten minutes and bring back something that would fit that exact need for about three quid.
The nearest town to us as an ironmonger, but it’s not a proper one.
Actually, the village I grew up in had a general store as well as the obligatory church, pubs, butchers, post office and ironmongers. It even had a garage/filling station, which my family owned. All of these closed decades ago (except for one of the pubs and, I’m sorry to say, the church) but recently and out of the blue the ironmongers re-opened. I haven’t been in but from the outside it looks like a sort of poor-man’s Yorkshire version of Paltrow’s shop, catering for people with a misguided sense of what rural life is like. I doubt you can get one of those things, you know the things I mean that sort of open like that and then you use the other bit to move it around and then it all goes on the stove, you know, one of *those* things, that you only ever need to use about twice in a lifetime but when you do you *really* need to.
Ha, when I think ‘an English seaside town’ I think of some noisy trashy tourist place. I don’t know why the English have done such a good job of destroying their coastline; Portsmouth is the only place I can think of offhand that has a pleasant ‘unspoiled’ beach promenade, and I’m guessing that’s because until very recently that whole area was military. Actually I’ve just thought of another, smaller one–Seaham in Durham–which was redeveloped only recently. I used to work for a guy from there; when he told me Seaham had been the location of the prison planet in Alien 3 I didn’t believe him. (Looking it up, Wikipedia says the exteriors were filmed at Blyth, but IMDB mentions Seaham as well.) While I’m free-associating here I’ll mention that Seaham Hall is where Lord Byron and Isabella Milbanke got married:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaham_Hall
Don’t know why the Wikipedia page says it became an old people’s home in 1991; as of maybe five years ago when I spent a couple of days there it was still an expensive very ’80s spa hotel.
‘There was never a pretty little general goods store in a village’–I don’t know about ‘pretty’, but not entirely true–grocers (who bought products wholesale, or ‘en gross’, to sell retail) could be found in small villages as early as the seventeenth century. Here’s a good history:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sugar-and-spice-9780199577927?cc=gb&lang=en&
Possibly interesting in the Paltrow context to realise that these kinds of shops were tied to colonialism–these were where you could buy tea, sugar, and other products from English colonies.
Seriously, guest, there are exactly two English seaside towns that are not awful?
That’s obviously ridiculous. Sticking with County Durham alone there are many quiet and unspoiled seaside towns. It’s mostly those towns that were Victorian resorts which have become unpleasant. Not all the places where people just lived and worked and which happened to be next to a sea have shared the same fate.
We British do have an exceptional skill for making beautiful places shit, but there are still plenty of amazingly beautiful places left, even within half an hour of where I live. Seaham is nice these days, but hardly ‘unspoiled’. It’s nothing like the fishing and pit village it used to be. It’s better in many ways, but not ‘unspoiled’ in the slightest degree.
If I remember rightly, the scenes from Alien 3 were filmed at Dawdon, which is the next beach down from Seaham harbour. It was a pit village and the beach was – disgracefully, see above – used for dumping waste coal. You can imagine why that was a good film location for a prison planet. As far as I know, the scenes at Blyth were in the (now thankfully demolished) power station(s).
I think some scenes from Billy Elliot were filmed in Seaham, too, weren’t they?
Anyway, there are still thousands of nice, unspoiled seaside towns in England and throughout the rest of Britain. You just have to steer clear of tourist spots, obviously.
:) I probably don’t get to most of them, since I don’t drive–I get off at the seaside train station, then go for a walk.
@guest:
To be fair, lots of them are shit.
@guest:
Come and visit! We can go and see the seals at Seal Sands or…the…sluice at….Seaton Sluice. Or the ridiculous but brilliant water-powered lift down to the sea at Saltburn.
Ah, yes. The room “for good”. My grandmother lived in a two up/twodown Victorian terrace. She lived in the back room, and her dining table was there too. The front room was nicely decorated, had a sofa and was never used. I have no idea what it was in her head, but it would have given her much more room if she’d stuck her table in there.
The nearest thing I can think of to a “mud room” is the drying room you might see on a very large estate – somewhere for the staff to dry The Family’s (and visitor’s) clothes after a hard day huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’. But you wouldn’t put gardening tools in there!
I was thinking a bit fuirther back in time than an ironmongers – but, yes, up to the 70s probably, you would indeed have an ironmongers to sell all those weird bits and pieces you occasionally needed and wouldn’t find anywhere else. Interestingly, those have more-or-less survived the great Supermarket Takeover by morphing into DIY and decorating shops – at least in town-size places upwards. I’ve got two independents within walking distance. I’d guess if you live in a little village, you’re probably dependant on the Homebase at the nearest retail park. Bit of a faff if all you want is a couple of door hooks.
British seaside towns can be awful – or so awful they’re amazing. Take Blackpool. I adore it in all it’s tackiness. Though I miss the Aliens and weird shit exhibition that lived on about 35 years past it’s heyday – to morph into a good, but far less entertaining, Doctor Who one. If you want to drink beer, eat chips, wander along the pier, go to Louis Toussauds and Ripley’s Believe it or Not, then make your self sick on a roller coaster, Blackpool is your place. They’ve even cleaned the beach up recently. Blackpool is so unapologetically tacky, and resistant to middle class gentrification – I’ve never been to another seaside town that proudly places vending machines dispensing edible knickers on the seafront! – that I cannot help but love it.
A lot of what’s being criticised here is a function wealth and class. The long seafronts with the amusement arcades and rock/souvenir shops – they’re there for the working class at play, and why the hell not? They entertain and occupy the kids (and some of the adults), they may not fit middle class sensibilities but they bring a lot of money into the local community in season. Those resorts are also cheaper than the ones where everything is pristine and “unspoiled”. That’s enough for the Middle Classes to get sniffy about the flashing lights, the working class guys in vests, the sound of the funfair etc. It’s all very well for them – they can afford the nice self-catering cottage in a tiny local village, miles from anywhere, where you can only get to the sea by car – automatically cuts down the riffraff – and may even have access to a private beach. The rest of us holidayed in cheap holiday flat lets, or on a caravan park if we were lucky. When I was a kid car ownership was far less common than today so you were reliant on the local town for all you entertainment for a week or more. So, yes, tuppeny waterfalls, pleasure beaches, souvenir rock, and later space invaders or, as we grew older, local pubs and clubs.
So, yes, plenty of unspoiled English villages by beaches. They’ll be the ones that are the more difficult to get to and have absolutely no facilities (because that’s essentially what “unspoiled” means). You have to have the means to look for them.
I’ve done several walks along that coastline–best was probably four days Berwick to Alnmouth, with a night on Lindisfarne–but your bit is exactly the bit I missed (I’m really peeved now that I missed out on the Saltburn industrial engineering–why did no one ever tell me about it when I was there??). Unfortunately I don’t live in that part of the country any more–I made the (possibly stupid) decision to leave God’s Country a couple of years ago and am now in a region almost as far from Yorkshire as I could get, which may be just as beautiful in its own way but isn’t nearly as fun, friendly or interesting (or maybe that’s just me still missing York). I did recently have a beautiful day out walking west from Swanage (which has its share of trashy buildings but is on the whole an attractive town)–I went down there to see Corfe Castle, which I’d wanted to visit ever since I read Pavane decades ago. If you ever want to make the diagonal trek to see this part of the coastline let me know–I have a huge house, and am just in the process of buying a new guest bed for a couple of demanding houseguests coming next month….
@Steamshovelmama
You’re right. It was partly the quotes around “unspoiled” that riled me up. Is Brighton more or less spoiled than Blackpool? Spoiled for whom? And who did the spoiling?
My point was that there are lots of plain old fishing, mining and (especially in my part of the world) legacy smuggling villages which are charming despite themselves. Communities adapt to what their environs dictate and it’s snobbish indeed to decide arbitrarily what is best for a place in which you don’t live.
I’ve only been to Blackpool once, about 25 years ago, I guess. It was horrible and absurd and brilliant at the same time. I understand why people love it. Personally, I could spend another 25 happy years without going back.
Well, by ‘unspoiled’ I meant ‘not building anything on or near that could be built anywhere else’–that is one thing I don’t entirely understand, why it is that vending machines, roller coasters, cotton candy, etc. cluster around the seaside; it seems to me you could build a complex like that anywhere, and probably on cheaper land.
‘Is Brighton more or less spoiled than Blackpool?’ To me they’re equally ‘spoiled’.
‘Spoiled for whom?’ Fish, birds, seals, whatever else used to live there. Farmers, fishers, collectors, smugglers, whoever else used to make their living there.
‘And who did the spoiling?’ Developers out to make a buck.
I will admit that as a ‘greenie’ and an engineer I have some pretty firm opinions on how we ‘ought’ to build and travel–but no opinion at all on any of the other English class ‘oughts’, though, e.g. what people wear, read, eat, listen to, whatever.
@Guest:
The Northumbrian coastline is just stunning. I’ve argued here before that it is one of the most beautiful places that exist. The east coast mainline train journey covers some of the most spectacular scenery you’ll see and it’s a shame that there are only 3 stops between Newcastle and Edinburgh because there are some amazing places in between.
Further down in County Durham and North Yorkshire we have exceptionally beautiful places too. The Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District, for example have a stark beauty which you have to see up close and are all the better for having relatively few tourists. My dad used to deliver hay, straw and bags of feed in this area and I sometimes went with him to haul the stuff about. There was one farmhouse in the dales which had a river running through it. It was in the kitchen. You had to step over it to get from the dining table to the sink. Whenever we delivered stuff there, they’d insist on feeding us. Landscapes shape people, don’t they?
That’s exactly it. “Spoiled” by middle class, rather privileged standards. No small coastal community will be pristine and untouched by progress – it just rather depends on what part of the tourist demographic it’s chosen to cater to. Even the most “unspoiled” community probably has a high end tea-shop selling overpriced snacks, and other things more to the taste of the middle classes, while Barmouth, say, (in Wales, a popular destination now and historically for the working class of the English Midlands because of the direct rail link from Birmingham) has kebab shops, amusements, interesting knickknack shops. It also has impressively dramatic cliffs and a lovely (though not blue flag) sandy beach. It’s a great holiday destination if you don’t have money to burn. It’s also utterly spoilt by a certain aesthetic standard. Nice ice cream sundae shop that overlooks the beach, the usual rock and funny t-shirt shops, shops selling dragon souvenirs (as a smaller girl my daughter adored them) and jewellery made from polished rock at pocketmoney prices. A few good seafood restaurants. If it was more “unspoilt” (translated: geared towards the middle classes) I wouldn’t have been able to take family holidays there. We had a great time.
Yep, that’s Blackpool. And it certainly isn’t to everyone’s taste. I find a weekend about once every five years works for us. That’s the thing though: spoilt/unspoilt is just a matter of taste. I can entirely understand why someone might take one look at Blackpool and run screaming for the hills – it entertains me, it doesn’t have to entertain anyone else. I can also entirely understand why someone might not like a seafront of rock shops and amusement arcades – it’s the high/low culture judgement involved in using the words “un/spoilt” that annoy me.
@latsot I visited the Lake District for the first time a few years ago to give a talk at a conference. I honestly wasn’t expecting much, since I figured the descriptions were hyperbolic–but I was completely blown away. It was an incredible experience. I’ve only been back once since then (to give another talk at the same place), but would love to actually take the time to explore it someday. I’ll have to get into better shape though, since I’m not used to serious hills.
A couple of friends of mine who are extremely well-travelled (much more so than me)–one English, one American–say they think the Yorkshire Dales is the most beautiful place in the world, and I don’t have any reason not to believe them.
@guest:
I agree entirely on what is and isn’t spoiled, but I’m also aware of the history of what let to the spoiling. It’d be great to have a reset button but is snobbish and to some extent foolish to criticise communities for breaking bits of their environment.
For example, fish aren’t scarce because of local fishers. They’re scarce because of obscenely vast networks of trawlers. It’s consumers that are harming the stocks of fish and – as a direct consequence – the livelihoods of the fishers who never did any actual harm to local fish. Well, other than on an individual level, of course.
Farmers in the areas we’re talking about have done some harm to some local animals and especially birds but not nearly so much as in the flat places of the country.
We have to be careful, of course, about exploiting land, plants and animals. We ought to find it horrific when it hurts something. But we also need to recognise that some ways of exploiting the environment are better than others and that’s it’s down to consumers to protect hillside farms, the way of life that sustains them and the beauty of the places, while at the same time protecting the wider environment.
@latsot I completely agree with all of what you wrote! Local farms and fisheries are the actual ‘unspoiled’ part of the landscape. People in charge of these businesses have no incentive to wipe out fish stocks or destroy their landbase–in fact just the opposite. These are exactly the kinds of industries we should be preserving and supporting. But corporate incentives turn this work into extraction, and take advantage of popular and legislative support for small businesses. (This happens all the time in the USA, e.g. legislation passed to ‘preserve family farms’ from destructive taxation is actually designed to benefit agribusiness firms.)
One of the things that was so overwhelming about the Lake District for me is that it was a completely managed landscape, and has been for centuries–I guess maybe I confused people by implying that ‘unspoilt’ means ‘no humans or human influence’.
The mudroom…the first I ever heard of such a thing was decades ago, but at any rate it was nothing like Paltrow’s posh garden shed / bespoke hats combination – it wasn’t a real room at all, just a corridor for taking off boots and wet jackets and the like. It may have also held a washing machine, I don’t remember. It depends a lot on climate, whether people think they Must Have them or not, but even then they’re seldom if ever real rooms. They’re a way to sequester mud and wet from the rest of the house.
Yes, that’s what I’d call a utility. It’s usually a corridor shaped extra bit of space accessed via the kitchen, or stuck on the back of the house. It usually has a few cupboards, maybe a washing machine and/or chest freezer, and all the awkwardly shaped junk that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Welly boots may well live there. They’re relatively common but certainly not ubiquitous. And the place you’ll find them is modern suburban houses, not little cottages! And a cottage dweller would probably have used the kitchen for such activities as drying coats and muddy boots. In a proper cottage (as opposed to what rich people like to call a cottage) kitchens would take up half (at least) of the ground floor space, and very often have a stone floor so muddy boots would not damage or dirty expensive rugs or furniture. An extra room to do these things in would be the sign of a very wealthy person…
Ha, yes, good point; I didn’t fully catch the incongruity of “This particular space was inspired by a room in an English cottage” – of course what that fool means is an imagined room in Highclere Castle.
You know who really needed a “mud room”? Miners. But they of course were the last people who could afford such a thing, so they had to clean the coal dust off in a tin tub in the kitchen, to the pleasure of no one.
I’d love to see our Gwyneth do a gushing piece on her new Chambre de Bain, inspired by the tin tubs in miners’ kitchens.
Yes, it often escapes rich people’s notice, but cottages were for poor people. At most they had two rooms up and two rooms down. The miner’s cottages in Barmouth had only one room up and down – when they turned them into holiday lets they had to knock two or more together to make a reasonable space.
I have miners in my family (I come from a long line of coal miners, farm workers, factory hands and maidservants). Indoor plumbing for the working classes didn’t arrive until the 1950s or later. My father grew up in a house that didn’t have an indoor plumbed bathroom until the 1960s. And that didn’t include a lavatory – that was down the back garden, and remained so until my grandmother went into sheltered accommodation in the 1980s (though by then it was very unusual – she was a stubborn woman, my grandmother). My mining predecessors would wash after work in the rain barrel, or in a cold bucket of water before coming into the house. Heating enough water for a tin bath was a major effort when you’re working on an open fire or a small stove. Once a week was plenty for that kind of effort – Dad in first, then down the family by status, baby last – which is where the phrase about throwing the baby out with the bathwater comes from. By the time you bathed the baby, the water was opaque.
Ah yes, of course. I know I’ve read accounts of people taking full baths in a tub in front of the kitchen fire, not as a matter of indoor plumbing but as one of pumping the water and heating it on the stove and pouring it into the tub, but I’ve also read accounts of how difficult it was for miners and what a struggle it was to get pithead showers. All of it was a million miles from Luxury Mud Rooms.
Pithead showers! Luxury! We ‘ad to mek do wit foreman spittin’ on us. And we wert grateful… ahem.
Yes, Paltrow is the epitome of the rich idiot who doesn’t know how much of an idiot she is.