Squirrel Boutique

A kitchen table in Essex, and a very good eye

Slow Squirrel is one woman, a kitchen table on the Essex and Suffolk border, and a habit of finding things. The name is the method: this is deliberately unhurried shopkeeping, built around working gently and well rather than quickly, and the table at the centre of it is the sort that is sometimes laid with good linen and sometimes just bare wood with a history of stains.

What she finds is worth the finding. Hand-painted ceramics from a South African studio that has been at it since 1986, all bead-like layered pattern and colour. Baskets handwoven in Kenya. Small-batch larder things, stationery, gardening bits, and the sort of homeware that looks as though somebody chose it rather than ordered it. Her own phrase for how she works is collaboration over competition, which explains a good deal about what ends up on the shelves.

She also throws open the doors periodically, holding seasonal open-house shopping events at Squirrel HQ and putting the proceeds towards local landmarks, the village church fund among them. Which is not a marketing strategy so much as what happens when a shop is genuinely part of a place.

Find her among our other British makers and boutiques. Have a browse.