Not For Squares

Just sit­ting here flick­ing and swoon­ing through our new purchase,

simple home is by Mark and Sally Bailey of the utterly lovely store Baileys Home and Garden.

The blurb on the back says, “One of the most inspir­ing interi­ors books we have seen in ages, giv­ing a room-by-room tour of spaces that embrace the Baileys’ love of the well-worn, the dis­tressed, the aban­doned and the recycled” Tele­graph Magazine.  And I agree whole-heartedly.

Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saat­chi & Saat­chi World­wide wrote this lovely piece about us on his blog KR Con­nect,

“A few weeks ago, I dis­covered Coulson Macleod, an art busi­ness mak­ing waves from Northamp­ton­shire. It’s the cre­ation of Mark Coulson and Han­nah Macleod, a couple who share a strik­ing design aes­thetic, rad­ic­ally pos­it­ive ambi­tion, and, most import­antly, love.

I’ve bought sev­eral of their pieces, which are all hand-finished in lim­ited edi­tions. The works in the Love Col­lec­tion are favor­ites of mine – bold typo­graphic designs fea­tur­ing declar­a­tions of feel­ing and fam­ous romantic lines from clas­sic movies. Other col­lec­tions cel­eb­rate the pop cul­ture of dec­ades past, the icons of music his­tory and the spirit of Cool Brit­an­nia – all top­ics close to the heart.

After I sent the team a note of encour­age­ment, Han­nah Macleod shared the company’s “simple little love story” with me. It’s also a story of smart, down-to-earth entre­pren­eur­ship. After fall­ing in love, the couple began work­ing together. Want­ing new art for their home, but not able to afford high-end prices, they decided to design their own rather than deign to buy mass-produced prints, and thus Coulson Macleod was born.

Start­ing small in March 2009, Han­nah and Mark didn’t have big dol­lars for pro­mo­tion, but built their own web­site and show­cased their designs online. The work spoke for itself, and with grow­ing sales they could soon begin advert­ising in top interi­ors magazines. Now, Coulson Macleod fields orders from all over the world, and tracks the buzz on their blog. Brides-to-be have con­tac­ted them to ask if they can read out the quote from the “What Is Love?” piece at their wed­ding – a spe­cial request as this was writ­ten by Mark.

As Han­nah described it to me, the com­pany is “built on love and driven by pas­sion”. The world needs more entre­pren­eurs like this. Here’s to spread­ing the Love.”

Yes, that’s right, Coulson Macleod is one today!

The idea to sell art popped into our heads just over a year ago. And by the 4^th March 2009 Coulson Macleod became an offi­cial business.

We launched our web­site on the 20^th, and cel­eb­rated our first sale of a lim­ited edi­tion print two weeks later. Now, in the nor­mal world of retail, two weeks would be rather a long time to wait for a cus­tomer. But at this stage you couldn’t have found us by search­ing on the inter­net. And we hadn’t advert­ised. We were ecstatic!

It’s been a bril­liant year.

We’ve shipped prints to far away lands. Aus­tralia. New Zea­l­and. Canada. And to prac­tic­ally every state in Amer­ica. Cus­tom­ers some­times buy more than one print at a time. Cus­tom­ers are com­ing back to buy more. For birth­day gifts, wed­ding gifts, or another print for their own walls.

So we’d like to take this oppor­tun­ity to thank all our cus­tom­ers. And to every­one all around the world who has taken the time to write about us. Whether you’ve just pos­ted an image of our art­work with a link back to us, or writ­ten a gush­ing wordy art­icle, we still get totally excited at see­ing our name out there.

We’ll be drink­ing a toast to our next year, which we’ve already got heaps of plans and designs for.

Cheers!

We men­tioned awhile back that a friend of Coulson Macleod had been nom­in­ated in the 2010 Blog­gies.

We can proudly announce that 3limes has won! 3limes won in the Best Latin Amer­ican category.

Well done Sam­antha, you deserve it as your blog makes for a bril­liant read. Next year fin­gers crossed she’ll win the Best African Web­log as Sam­antha now lives in Uganda (she used to live in Trin­idad). If you have a spare five minutes do read her blog, a fas­cin­at­ing insight into liv­ing in the more exotic parts of the world.

I get very excited when I meet other cre­at­ive folk and par­tic­u­larly when they’re local to Coulson Macleod. If we lived in Lon­don we’d expect to meet like-minded design­ers all the time. But we’re not in Lon­don. So I have the pleas­ure of intro­du­cing a brand new busi­ness, Smiles Design, owned by Stephanie Miles, a freel­ance tex­tile designer. Stephanie makes the quir­ki­est neck­laces I’ve seen for awhile and I can see them being big news.

I’m abso­lutely lov­ing this bird­cage neck­lace (£20)…

I also love love love her cards (£5.95), which remind me of Rob Ryan…

Stephanie’s busi­ness is so new that she doesn’t even have a web­site yet, but if you’d like to place an order then you can con­tact her at smiles.uk7 @ mac​.com

Just had some really great close-up shots of our lim­ited edi­tion can­vas print ‘Amer­ican Noise’ — and we think they look fantastic.

Our can­vas prints are fin­ished by hand, by exper­i­enced local crafts­men.  We use a nat­ural (100% cot­ton), tex­tured can­vas, com­ple­men­ted by a chunky (45mm deep) Dutch spruce frame.

Let us know what you think.

As we approach our first birth­day, we thought it was about time to add a Testi­mo­ni­als page to the Coulson Macleod website.

We asked some of our more high pro­file and cre­at­ive cus­tom­ers for their com­ments. We’ve got five lovely com­ments so far, so do check out our web­site to read them.

Of course, if you’re a Coulson Macleod cus­tomer who has a busi­ness that you’d like us to link back to, then please let us know. We’ve only been able to ask our cus­tom­ers that sup­plied a busi­ness email address so we could identify them. But we’d love to hear from you too.

Coulson Macleod now offers a per­son­al­iz­a­tion service.

Coulson Macleod bespoke art. Per­fect wed­ding gift.

The bespoke piece has to based on these best-selling prints from our Love Collection:

Simply pick a sim­ilar num­ber of words and sen­tences that you want to incor­por­ate, and we do the rest, res­ult­ing in a one-off piece of bespoke art­work that’s totally per­sonal to you.

An ideal gift for someone get­ting mar­ried or a wed­ding anniversary.

Our bespoke prints cost £199.

Just found the most gor­geous place to stay (via Lake Jane) in Mar­rakech. Riad Dixneuf la ksour. My oh my it looks heav­enly. Mar­rakech is a place I fell in in love with many years ago. Intox­ic­at­ing. The smell. The heat. The sounds. The souk. The tagines. OK I think you get the picture!

Just stumbled across the works of Finnish artist Car­oline Slotte (via Lost) and instantly fell in love with her work. Car­oline reworks found objects, mainly second hand ceramics.