HOME SPRING 95magical, not dissimilarly to Dennis Severs ex-
traordinary Spitalfi elds home. Hendy agrees.
‘Severs was a storyteller. I think I too am a
storyteller. David Bowie, my childhood hero,
was a storyteller – each album took on a new
persona and told a new story. I think I do that
with houses – live, breath and reinvent myself
with each project. It’s all make-believe but
done with meticulous care. You feel connected
to and wed with the past and story you’ve
concocted. Everyone loves a dream.’
Hendy’s busy brain, however, was not content
with one restoration project; when a shop
in Hastings Old Town that had been badly
neglected and criminally ‘modernised’ with
laminates and linoleum was going cheap,
he saw potential. After a painstaking and
expensive renaissance, in 2011 he opened A
G Hendy and Co, a homeware store which,
incomparably, makes something beautiful
of the below stairs aesthetic, selling exquisite
brushes, pans, and domestic implements for
the home. ‘There’s a poetry in the everyday,’
he explains. ‘The unashamed elegance of the
domestic has been my go-to all my life: from
the scrubbed tables and creamware of below-
stairs in country houses – not forgetting their
drab painted cupboards, shelved pantries,
exposed pipework and batteries of scullery
sinks. I am told I go too far, and get scalded for
admiring the utilitarian of Hitler’s bunker – all
concrete with galvanised conduit, 1940s work
lights and metal desks. But it works. As a child
I’d visit St Francis asylum in Hay wards Heath- to talk to the patients – and took in the Vic-
torian institutional architecture; my boarding
school was Victorian and I spent much time
in its large kitchen, cooking the staff supper
at the age of 10. I’m below-stairs born and
bred. Give me an old tap and a massive sink
and I’m in heaven.’
The less is more approach combined with
the historical is, he says, minimalism grown-
up. His shop is a living nod to the past, the
yearned-for traditional family-run depart-
ment store. ‘It is a bit like a storybook. Its
dust jacket is the dark frontage and windows,
opening into paragraphs of rooms that weave
a narrative. Seeing customers place their pur-
chases on the counter for wrapping, it’s as
though they’ve been on a journey and these
are their tales.’
There’s much more than just products
for sale, like a 1930s Handy Hints page for
a monthly illustrated practical tip on how to
make light work of chores and repairs, their
make-do-and-mend philosophy a breath of
fresh air in today’s throw-away world, and
encapsulating all that is charming about
Hendy’s meticulously, beautifully created
world, whose slogan – ‘A G Hendy & Co for
goods that cannot be hoped for elsewhere’
– could not be more apt.INSPIRE|STYLE
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