Our first San Francisco store opened in June on Grant Avenue, and we’ve been exploring the culture and lifestyle that this beautiful city has to offer. Our correspondent has been out and about compiling stories and features exclusively for the blog, starting with San Francisco’s famous culture of food.
From farmer’s markets and fresh produce to award-winning restaurants and exclusive recipes, over the coming weeks and months we’ll be bringing all the things Mulberry loves in San Francisco.
We’ve opened our first store in San Francisco on Grant Avenue. To celebrate our arrival on the West Coast, we hosted a launch event with five co-hosts from Vogue’s ’100 list’ of talented and influential women: Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Connie Nielsen, Sabrina Buell, Rachael Mann and Mackenzie Burdick.
We kept the evening true to our roots, serving food from London’s famous restaurant J Sheekey Fish Restaurant and Oyster Bar and drinks by Herefordshire-based and family-run Chase Vodka. The store has its own gallery and exhibition space on the second floor, which for the evening showcased an exhibition of British photography from the past few decades, handpicked from the Vogue archives.
Our newest store has opened, and it’s nestled among the iconic streets of San Francisco, California.
The store is in a beautiful, traditional nineteenth century building on Grant Avenue. As well as having enough space to showcase our ever-growing collection of accessories, shoes and womenswear, it is also our first store with a dedicated gallery space.
The store was designed in close collaboration with renowned British architects Universal Design Studio and, as with our flagship stores on New Bond Street in London and Spring Street in New York, is designed to reflect our dedication to craftsmanship and heritage, as well as complementing the building’s own personality.
When you’re next in San Francisco, we look forward to welcoming you into the store. And thank you so much to San Francisco and its residents for such a warm welcome to the area!
We’ve left our heart in San Francisco…
Mulberry is opening soon on Grant Avenue.
Out and about on the streets of New York we headed to Brooklyn and found some lovely things, including…
Jean Aw, founder of NOTCOT – a digital community of creatives, design lovers and trendsetters – is a veritable world traveller. Currently based in her hometown of Los Angeles, California she is very mobile, hopping around the country and across the globe, entrenching herself in international culture and their respective design hotspots.
She often finds the most incredible things in the most unlikely of places and loves bringing them to her readers. Jean has put together an exclusive New York download just for us!
Gramercy Park Hotel
New York has become home away from home the last few years. And while many have tried to convince me to do the bicoastal LA-NY thing officially, my NY home still involves hotel living! But as far as favorite’s go… Gramercy Park Hotel’s incredible service, cosy rooms, rooftop (perfect for brunch meetings and catch ups!) and location are hard to beat. I love curling up in the rooftop seating under the ceiling of lightbulbs or gorgeous green vines with good friends and delicious drinks.
On random rituals, I usually catch the direct flight cross country that gets me in to JFK around 8, hop in a cab to Gramercy Park Hotel, check in, drop my bags, and take a quick walk over to Shake Shack for a Coffee Frozen Custard and Shack Burger either in the park or back at the hotel… checking email and my sites while i walk.
Every city has its special shopping spots so unique to itself, that you’ll find products hard to discover anywhere else (though the internet does make this harder and harder every day!) my shops not to miss to browse design collections and unexpected surprises are:
ABC Home and ABC Kitchen
ABC Home: I can wander floor by floor for ages, there are so many beautifully curated home objects to lust after! And when the hunger sets in, there’s Jean-Georges’ ABC Kitchen where amongst the delicious food, you must try the Dragon Slayer elixir shot (wheat grass, jalapeño, cilantro, lime!)
Matter: Always a beautifully curated collection of design items and furnishings.
The Future Perfect: The Future Perfect was born from the desire to showcase the newest and best in decorative arts and design. At once it is a store, shop, gallery and mecca, mixing talent from New York and the world.
Kiosk: “Things from places” – they collect and transform the ordinary into the extraordinary as they create collections of products from various locations, in the past collections have come from Japan, Sweden, Mexico, Finland, Hong Kong, Iceland and more!
The Evolution Store
The Evolution Store: From skeletons and taxidermy to jewelry and unexpected gift items, it is like falling into a stunning Natural History Museum of sorts where everything can come home with you. I feel like you learn something new every time you walk through.
Fish's Eddy
Fish’s Eddy: It blows my mind every time i walk into the store and see the dishware stacked from floor to ceiling throughout the store. There’s always something fun to be discovered here.
MoMA Store: Not just another museum store… the MoMA Store’s destination collections remind me of Kiosk with their location themed product collections – currently featuring Mexico!
Clinton Street Baking Company
Oh, and one more thing i never miss – Brunch at Clinton Street Baking Company – you can’t go wrong with their Eggs Benedict and Southern Breakfast.
While this list could keep growing, and is making me miss NY even as i write it, think of these as just a starting point of some of my favourites for a NOTCOT day in NY!
NOTCOT is a visual filtration of ideas, aesthetics and amusements. NOTCOT.ORG houses a community of creatives, design lovers, and trendsetters – with the site serving as our studio bulletin board gone digital – each image and caption brings you to a place worth visiting.
Creative Director Emma Hill and Frieze founders Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover hosted an intimate dinner in honour of the artists of Frieze Projects at the debut Frieze New York.
The Mulberry-sponsored Frieze Projects is a not-for-profit initiative featuring commissioned artworks around the outdoor space of Randall’s Island, which are accessible to all visitors to the area.
The artists involved with Frieze Projects attended the dinner, held at The Crown restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side, and joined guests including Lana Del Rey (who sang an exclusive set for our guests), Alexa Chung, Lauren Remington-Platt and the Courtin-Clarins sisters Claire, Jenna, Virginie and Prisca as well as Frieze Projects curator Cecilia Alemani.
Some of our favourite musical talents joined us for our Coachella party in Palm Springs, with performances from British bands Kasabian, Metronomy and The Vaccines as well as US brother-sister duo Wild Belle.
We captured some of the musical moments across the weekend, at the party, during the interviews and between games of croquet!
Natalie from Wild Belle takes time out on the lawn of The Parker Hotel
Kasabian performing an exclusive acoustic set
Joe from Metronomy takes on NME's Krissi at a game of croquet
Wild Belle's set list
The boys from The Vaccines talk fantasy festivals and their new album with Krissi
Wild Belle performing poolside at The Parker Hotel
Kasabian's set list
Wild Belle's song sheet
We hosted an exclusive pool party at the Parker Hotel in Palm Springs to celebrate Coachella 2012.
Katie Dailey, Shopping and Style Editor at TIME OUT London tells us why we should visit Brighton, the classic (but also eclectic) English seaside town and the setting for our Spring Summer 2012 campaign shoot.
Brighton, the free spirited San Francisco of the British coast, has always provided a bolt hole for the creative, the vegetarian, and the strange. Its brand of bawdy postcard fun- from its arcade jammed pier to its seafront ice-creameries- was founded on the notion of harmless laughs. And there’s still no finer place to find them.
Stay in the world’s first knitted bedroom
Local crafty type Kate Jenkins (aka Kate Cardigan) has knitted every last inch of the Do Knit Disturb suite in the Hotel Pelirocco, tucked right by the beach front. Bedside lamp, in-room telephone, seagull, curtains and even morning fry up come clacked together on Jenkins’s needles.
From £59 a night, www.hotelpelirocco.co.uk
Swim in the historic lido…
Before it’s bulldozed into penthouses. The grand old art deco building of the Saltdean Lido gives it the appearance of a handsome steam liner. Second only to the bone-chilling briny, this 1930s pool is the best place to take a swim in the area. Dip your toe in while you can, as residents are currently fighting the owner’s plans to develop it into flats.
Swim for £4, www.saltdean.info
Take a drink for the people
The Robin Hood pub was set up by local millionaire Martin Webb in 2004. It is unique in the UK in that every penny of profit goes straight to local charities- meaning each time you lift your glass, you’re doing a little bit for the people of Brighton.
www.peoplespubs.com
Get your rocks on
You really can’t go to Brighton without coming back with at least one tooth cracking stick of rock. But why settle for an off the peg candy stripe when you can go bespoke? Sandee’s, Brighton’s major rock maker, will manufacture you your own personalised batch- with any words you like.
250 sticks of personalised rock, £199, www.letteredrock.co.uk
Have a rhubarb and custard flavoured ice cream
Just off the beach front, Scoop and Crumb home make retro ice creams in nostalgic flavours like Rhubarb & Custard and Apple Crumble. They also dabble in special dairy editions like Oreo and Ginger, and towering knickerbockers in old fashion glasses. The sorbet striped parlour is co-owned by a Swede, meaning there’s also a lunch menu of gravadlax and rye. But we recommend loosening your belt and sticking to the ‘bockers.
From £4 for a knickerbocker, www.scoopandcrumb.com
Make friends with old Vera
The world’s first electric railway continues to trundle along Brighton’s seafront, linking the Pier at one end to Black Rock, for the Marina. Really only a brief walk, but it makes for a lovely trip. True locomotion nerds can join VERA- the friendly Volk’s Electric Railways Association, who have charged themselves with protecting the vintage railcars and its rickety old tracks.
£1.10 one way (60p for children) www.volkselectricrailway.co.uk
Observe a gerbil’s dinner party
It’s a museum, but not as you might know it. Edward Booth dedicated his life to collecting (and meticulously stuffing) birds, and his Natural History Museum houses his collection as well as many others- from woolly rhino fossils to mounted chaffinches in flight. The NHM specialises in Victoriana taxidermy, meaning brilliantly peculiar set ups in glass boxes- think stuffed gerbils captured mid-flow at a dinner party. The ‘exotic’ room is a particular draw- a kind of Brighton man’s Deyrolle, with a huge collection of butterflies. Allow a day.
Free entry, www.brighton-hove-rpml.org.uk
Get the cogs turning
Mechanical Memories recalls the simple charms of the gaming of yesteryear. It’s an old fashioned arcade on the boardwalk, stuffed with jangly old slot machines from the 1900s, horse racing games, one armed bandits- and evening some brilliantly chintzy old fortune telling and wish granting machines. Just don’t wish to be big.
Free entry, www.mechanicalmemoriesmuseum.co.uk
