Coulson Macleod vis­ited Wel­beck Abbey’s Christ­mas Art & Food Mar­ket at the week­end and came across some inter­est­ing design­ers. In par­tic­u­lar we loved…

Kate Thornton Design’s greet­ing cards.

Lucy Alice’s cush­ions.

Suet Yi Ceram­ics.

Sarah Turner’s lamp­shades made from recycled plastic bottles.

The Jamie Oliver Found­a­tion once again held their annual fun­draiser ‘A Big Night Out With Jamie’.

And once again Coulson Macleod was delighted to be involved.

Shored­itch Town Hall. Venue for ‘A Big Night Out With Jamie’ 2011

Coulson Macleod’s bespoke print designed for ‘A Big Night Out With Jamie’

And once again our bespoke typo­graphic print was won by David Ellender, Global CEO of Fre­mantle Media who paid the final bid of £950 in the silent auc­tion. Last year David won the bid on another bespoke print we designed for the same event, pay­ing £1,100 for it. He’s obvi­ously a man of impec­cable taste.

And once again we received Jamie’s latest recipe book. This time it was ‘Jamie’s Great Bri­tain’, signed by the man him­self, of course. And a lovely thank you let­ter. Jamie said they raised £135,000 on the night. Which is pretty impress­ive in these fin­an­cially leaner times.

The Jamie Oliver Found­a­tion also emailed us to say, “We want to thank you very much for your end­less sup­port. It def­in­itely would not have been pos­sible without your gen­er­ous donation.”

Designed by Superfantastic

Other details of the night.…

Kate Nash per­formed. Ben Shep­h­ard hos­ted. Jools wore orange (thanks Daily Mail for that snip­pet). And not for­get­ting Gen­naro Con­t­aldo (as promp­ted by Jamie on Twitter)..

Jamie Oliver’s tweet to Coulson Macleod

“The Jamie Oliver Found­a­tion is a registered char­ity whose mis­sion is to empower, edu­cate and engage as many people as pos­sible to love and enjoy good food. This means learn­ing how to cook, under­stand­ing where food comes from, and recog­niz­ing the power it can have on our health, hap­pi­ness, and even fin­ances. We do this through teach­ing, train­ing and employ­ment, and also by mak­ing good clear inform­a­tion avail­able to as many people as possible.”

Designed by Superfantastic

Related art­icles:

• Jamie Oliver & Coulson Macleod
• A Big Night Out With Jamie
• A Big Jamie Oliver Thank You

There was an art­icle in yesterday’s Sunday Tele­graph entitled ‘The £20m two-bedroom house’ by Richard Eden that caught Coulson Macleod’s eye.

See­ing as he writes so much bet­ter than we can, this is an edited ver­sion of his article…

“François Pin­ault, who foun­ded PPR, the lux­ury goods com­pany that owns fash­ion labels includ­ing Gucci and Stella McCart­ney, has paid £20 mil­lion for a house in Chelsea.

Pho­to­graph by François Halard

Mr Pin­ault, 75, whose son, François-Henri is mar­ried to Salma Hayek, the Hol­ly­wood actress, is plan­ning a pro­gramme of alter­a­tions to the Queen Anne revival-style property.

The house was used as the bach­elor pad of Richard Griffith’s char­ac­ter, Uncle Monty, in the cult 1986 film With­nail and I.

Mr Pin­ault, who is a friend of Jacques Chirac, the former French pres­id­ent, pro­poses the “rein­state­ment of ori­ginal fea­tures such as the main stair­case” and plans to redesign the bed­rooms, kit­chen and bathroms.

Mr Pin­ault, who owns the Château Latour wine estate, is one of France’s two richest men.

He pos­sesses one of the biggest col­lec­tions of con­tem­por­ary art in the world (ahem!) and has col­lec­ted works by Damien Hirst, the Brit­ish artist.

In 1998, the tycoon, who owns two art gal­ler­ies in Venice, bought a major­ity share of Christies’s auc­tion house.”

For some reason, we at Coulson Macleod HQ like to know what Mr Pin­ault is up to. Prob­ably as he seems to be a man of great taste.

Related art­icles:

• Coulson Macleod Spot­ted On TV
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Today Coulson Macleod loves

Very sweet & unique recycled or recyc­lable greet­ings cards…

Formed in 2010 by Sarah Brit­ton, Cathy Haworth, and Mur­ray Thomson.

This is what they say about them­selves, “Sarah has over 20 years exper­i­ence in mar­ket­ing and print pro­duc­tion and loves being by the sea; Cathy is a suc­cess­ful graphic designer with over 11 years exper­i­ence and has uncon­trol­lable frizzy hair; Mur­ray is a Dir­ector of Apple Col­our and has over 150 years exper­i­ence in the print industry. He also likes bright col­oured socks.

And we all  what we do.”

Related art­icles:

• Greet­ings
• Coulson Macleod Loves Ruby Wren

Launched at the Spirit of Christ­mas Fair, ladies & gen­tle­men we are delighted to introduce

Coulson Macleod’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ lime­stone typo­graphic print…

solid lime­stone print. unframed.

Lime­stone size is 40cm x 20cm x 1.2cm

solid lime­stone print. framed with reclaimed wood.

Size when framed is 48cm x 28cm x 4cm.

The frame is hand­made using reclaimed antique Vic­torian roof tim­bers. We pur­pose­fully retain any defects in the tim­ber to add to the charm and char­ac­ter of the piece. These can include knot holes, nail holes, warps and water marks, so each frame is totally unique.

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Say hello to Coulson Macleod’s new stockist.

Pretty nice hey?

This is Burford House. One of two stores run by the Burford Garden Com­pany.

Burford House is in Worcester­shire, between the mar­ket towns of Ten­bury Wells and Ludlow.

As well as this gor­geous Geor­gian man­sion, the Burford Garden Com­pany also has a store in Burford, Oxfordshire.

Burford Garden Com­pany focus on products of last­ing value and clas­sic design, often with a mod­ern twist. Well that per­fectly describes our typo­graphic art.

They say, “If there’s one thing we’ve learned in our 30 years, it’s that pas­sion inspires passion…and qual­ity is the key to a customer’s heart.” We second that. We’re all about pas­sion. And qual­ity. Pas­sion drives us. Qual­ity drives our customer.

Who fan­cies a trip to the Cotswolds?

Related art­icles:

• Typo­graphic Art & Glas­gow Style
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Our very good friends over at Rock My Wed­ding were asked along to The National Wed­ding Show (in Lon­don Earl’s Court & Birmingham’s NEC). They were given a stand in the blog­gers area along with our other wed­ding blog friends I Am Staggered.

And Rock My Wed­ding asked us if we’d provide some typo­graphic art­work.

We have massive respect for Rock My Wed­ding. Prac­tic­ally every­one get­ting mar­ried reads it. We’re get­ting mar­ried next June. And we read it daily. The founder, Char­lotte, is also a Coulson Macleod cus­tomer. So how could we refuse?

We sent them our ‘Wed­ded Bliss’ & ‘It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll’ typo­graphic lime­stone prints.

Their pho­tos from their blog are so lovely we’ve put them here for you to see too.

Rock My Wed­ding fea­tur­ing Coulson Macleod lime­stone art

Rock My Wed­ding fea­tur­ing Coulson Macleod lime­stone art

Rock My Wed­ding fea­tur­ing Coulson Macleod lime­stone art

Rock My Wed­ding fea­tur­ing Coulson Macleod lime­stone art

Related art­icles:

• Coulson Macleod Wed­ding: Save The Date
• Coulson Macleod Get Engaged

Last week Coulson Macleod was at the Spirit of Christ­mas Fair at Lon­don Olympia.

This is our stand GR9 right at the very begin­ning with our lovely hand­made typo­graphic art piled up amongst the boxes…

And our first stand design, which we later re-jigged…

Last minute re-jigging before the Fair opened to the public…

London’s Olympia look­ing very Christmassy…

Every­one frantic­ally mak­ing last minute adjustments…

The front of our stand GR9 show­ing our lime­stone typo­graphic art…

And show­ing our framed lime­stone prints, solid ash gift col­lec­tion and ‘Dec­ades’ prints…

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• Top Drawer 2011; The Build-Up
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Timon Werhli is an old friend of Coulson Macleod. And he is an amaz­ing photographer.

Ori­gin­ally from the UK, Timon began his pho­to­graphy career in Los Angeles in 1988, after gradu­at­ing from London’s pres­ti­gi­ous Royal Col­lege of Art and Design. Timon’s extens­ive travels brought him to Hong Kong, which is where we first met him.

Through his Red Dog Stu­dio, Timon has pho­to­graphed celebrit­ies such as Tony Leung, Enrique Iglesias, and Brad Pitt and shot many advert­ising cam­paigns and high-end fash­ion edit­or­i­als. But it’s the pho­to­graphs from his per­sonal cre­at­ive pro­jects, includ­ing a month long doc­u­ment­ary pro­ject with the last nomadic tribe in Mongolia, that have won our hearts…

Related art­icles:

• Coulson Macleod Loves Tim Green
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Inter­est­ing art­icle in the busi­ness sec­tion of the Sunday Tele­graph. Headline…

‘Made In UK’ at John Lewis

John Lewis is to launch a ‘buy Brit­ish’ cam­paign in its stores and mark all products sourced in the UK with a Union Jack. They are doing it because they believe busi­nesses should be sup­port­ing UK manufacturing.

And so do we at Coulson Macleod. Obvi­ously the design of both the art­work and the frames are done by us at Coulson Macleod. So the entire piece is unique to us. That is very import­ant. All of our typo­graphic prints are made in the UK. In fact we source not just UK-based busi­nesses, but busi­nesses as local to us as possible.

At the moment we use six busi­nesses in a twenty mile radius to us and two more that are a little fur­ther afield. Most of these are small artisan firms, spe­cial­ising in their craft whether it be high-end bespoke car­pentry or reclaimed wood or Fine Art Guild fram­ing. Most are in our own county of Northamptonshire.

We could buy in bulk from China. Which would bring the cost down. But we value crafts­man­ship. And we value the idea of sup­port­ing our region.

In our own small way we are mak­ing a dif­fer­ence. And that feels good.

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• Coulson Macleod Is Eco And GB Friendly
• Some Recent Press…