It’s a blazing hot day in the Cotswolds, and over by the designated “dog parking” area, a silver Mercedes 4x4 scrunches to a halt. Its occupants — two thirtysomething blondes in matching white jeans — hook their designer bags over their arms and stride across to the honeyed stone barns that are home to Daylesford Organic.
Inside, it’s like a sweet shop for farmhouse-food junkies. The women browse the pale-wood shelves and counters, stocking up on fresh strawberries and currants, cucumber and basil soup, a hunk of cheese and a bit of lamb, all of it in the sort of utility-chic packaging that has food-porn magazine stylists cooing in ecstasy. Afterwards, they move on to the garden room for a tin of wild bird seed and a deerskin dog lead, then through to the spa for a Balinese massage and an organic yoga mat. At Daylesford, no aspect of the neo-bucolic dream is left unstyled. This isn’t just a farm shop — it’s a rural concept store.
Funny how the organic revolution has changed. It’s no longer simply about eating healthier, happier, more ethically and environmentally produced food — it’s about fashion. What we have on our tables now says as much about our tastes and aspirations as the clothes we wear or the handbags we carry. Locally sourced, traditionally grown, ethically produced, organic: they’re all just a different kind of designer label. It’s not that we don’t want to do the right thing by the planet and our consciences, but we want to do it without compromising our aesthetics or our taste buds. And it’s the luxury organic brands that can give us the full authentic package that are coming out on top.
But are they delivering what they promise? Daylesford, the Cotswolds fiefdom of Carole Bamford, wife of the JCB mogul Sir Anthony, certainly pushes all the right buttons. Lady B greets me looking effortlessly eco-chic in a floor-length white summer coat, hand-woven from a blend of recycled paper and nettle fibre. She is not, her PR is keen to point out, simply a figurehead, but very hands-on, with the food, the packaging, the whole look of the place. “What I’ve done, without realising it,” she says, “is create something that is not only organic, but tasteful. It has the sense that people are buying into a whole lifestyle experience. I think what people like about it is that it’s modern, but with traditional values.”
The brand is stocked in Colette, the Parisian fashion-meets-lifestyle concept store, alongside limited-edition Nikes and collections by Lanvin and Marc Jacobs. It has fans in high places — Gwyneth Paltrow is rumoured to have stopped Lady B in the street and gushed: “You’ve created something wonderful!” At times, though, the Daylesford experience can feel just a bit too perfect, as if conceived for a bunch of Chelsea Marie Antoinettes who want to encounter rural life without ever muddying their wellies. The pots of herbs on the Spencer Fung-designed cafe tables could be straight out of The Conran Shop. The barn doors are painted that particular shade of pale grey-green that whispers polite good taste. The topiaried spirals and pyramids dotting the courtyard cafe seem a little too artfully contrived. Then again, maybe this is what we want from the country now — all the chic, but none of the muck.
Either way, this isn’t just the hobby of a rich woman with too much time on her hands. Lady Bamford started converting the estate to organic 20 years ago, and now, with the family’s other estate, Wootton, in Staffordshire, it produces all the food for the Daylesford brand — the meat, the fruit and veg, the wheat for the bread, the milk for the on-site dairy. There’s a huge market garden, a flock of shaggy-haired sheep, cows so fluffy they could have been blow-dried and a newly arrived quintet of gloucester old spot piglets, nicknamed Girls Aloud.
There’s no doubting Lady B’s environmental commitment. “When we did the barn,” she says, “we recycled wood from the estate and we were careful to use low-energy lighting. We try to get it right with our packaging and literature as well: recycled paper — being responsible. We’ve just come up with a biodegradable milk container that’s made of chalk.” The farm shop has already expanded to include a range of ethically produced clothes designed by Lady Bamford herself. Pretty, wafty and white, they are as much a part of the Daylesford lifestyle manifesto as its foodie nirvana.
What kick-started the whole luxury organic market, of course, was Duchy Originals. Prince Charles’s Duchy Home Farm, at Highgrove in Gloucestershire, was first converted in 1985, and has been ploughing an organic furrow ever since. In 1990, they decided to turn oats from the farm into an oaten biscuit. The Duchy brand was born. “There was a lot riding on that first biscuit,” says David Wilson, the farm manager. “There was a lot invested ideologically.” These days, the brand has 200 products and makes £1.2m profit each year, which goes to the Prince’s charities. Much of the range is now grown elsewhere, but the flour for the biscuits, the barley for the beer, the milk, the beetroot and carrots for the vegetable crisps and the mustard still come from the farm where it all started. It’s a picturesque spot, the farmhouse draped in wisteria, the fields of clover, barley oats and rye crisscrossed with “green lanes” of hedgerow. Outside the stables, a lurcher lies panting on the flagstones. Add Gemma Ward in Temperley and you could be in a Vogue shoot.
Whoever you talk to in the organic world, Prince Charles gets namechecked somewhere along the line. The Prince of Wales was a pioneer — everyone says so. Despite the wisecracks and negative comments (remember those “mad prince talks to plants” jibes?), he showed that organic wasn’t simply something hippies did in their back gardens. Not only was it workable on a large scale and could turn a profit, but it could actually be rather posh.
“The packaging had to represent what we were trying to say,” says Wilson. “Clean, classic, sophisticated, back to nature, but also quality. It tells a story.” The Duchy crest no doubt gets the aspirational middle England vote, but there’s something more going on here. The semi- opaque paper used to wrap the sausages speaks to our nostalgic yearnings for a different time and a better way of doing things, as though each set of bangers has been wrapped by a rosy-cheeked butcher who knows your name. Jams boast that they are made in copper pots, just as they used to be. The company was also the first to put a picture of a pig on its bacon, and explain how the pigs had lived blissful and blameless lives. “When they devised the packaging, the producers told us we were mad,” Wilson recalls. “People didn’t want to think about the fact that it came from an animal. But we think that everyone who eats meat should know about its life. Organic consumers are different.”
The people at Duchy HQ don’t like the word lifestyle — they say it detracts from the core message of the brand. They even look slightly alarmed when I ask them about celebrity fans (for the record, they include Dame Judi Dench, Emma Thompson and Madonna, who is said to use the hand lotion). But a lifestyle brand it is: it’s authentic, and these days, there’s no more positive lifestyle statement than that. In recent years, the food range has been augmented by organic beauty products and gardening tools, and there’s a cookery book planned. As for a plate of Duchy oaten biscuits on your dinner table — in some London boroughs, it has become a universal indicator of chic.
One of the newcomers to the luxury organic market is Sharpham Park in Somerset, which has made a speciality of spelt (an ancient cereal grain), walnuts and rare-breed meat. Sharpham’s owner, Roger Saul, knows a thing or two about luxury lifestyle brands. Until three years ago, Saul was chairman of the fashion, interiors and accessories label Mulberry, which he founded in 1971. He also owns Charlton House, a hotel and restaurant near Shepton Mallet. Just as he was ousted from the Mulberry board, the 300-acre farm and parkland surrounding his rambling manor house on the edge of the Somerset levels came up for sale. He and his wife, Monty, a former Dior house model, bought the land and started converting it to organic. At the same time, his sister developed cancer and, unable to eat wheat, was advised to try spelt instead. The main crop was decided. Saul then set about restoring and restocking the old deer park with red deer, partly as window-dressing for the brand, followed by herds of white park cattle, and hebridean and manx loghtan sheep.
As we bounce down the track in Saul’s American Willy second world war jeep, there’s a staggering view out across the levels to Glastonbury Tor. Up on the top fields, the spelt is already standing 3ft high. Bakers have started using Saul’s spelt flour to make wheat-free bread; his beef, lamb and venison goes into his own-label wheat-free sausages, and he has just launched a range of spelt pizzas. His breakfast cereals — packaged in simple brown paper bags, with a brief history of Saul’s “speltacular” journey on the back — are already on the menu at the Dorchester and are due to go nationwide in the next few months. On top of all that, there’s a range of spelt-based beauty products for Monty’s Spa at Charlton House (also available from Liberty).
Tellingly, when the pizzas were launched in London last month, Saul chose to do it at the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, with an audience of local yummy mummies and their children, invited along for a special showing of the farm-fantasy Babe. Of course, he’s consciously targeting a particular kind of customer. “My Mulberry background meant that I was used to taking something and making something of it,” he says. “We realised that, to make this work, we had to produce a Sharpham Park brand. We had the deer park, the history. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to get that into marketable shape.”
There’s no Sharpham shop yet, but, he says: “Our aim is to open a butcher’s, baker’s, brasserie, nursery — in our style, not anyone else’s.” You only need to look at the people already buying his brand to know that he’s on to something. At one of his local stockists, True, a chic little deli in the Somerset town of Castle Cary, it’s as if the clientele has been shipped in from yummy mummy central casting. They are the same women who buy their Dr Hauschka and Aveda at the local salon; the same ones who buy the designer watering cans from the bijou garden store opposite; the same ones who browse the vintage clothing in the quirky shop along the street. Organic, not about lifestyle? You’ve got to be kidding.
