Bloom time

In 15 years, Cath Kidston has seen her floral-print homeware and clothing business grow from a single shop into a multi-million pound empire. Lydia Slater meets the woman behind the label and finds out why things are looking especially rosy in the Middle East.

Cath Kidston's floral prints, pastel kitchenware and children's clothes patterned with pictures of ducks exude quintessentially English nostalgia. Step inside any of her shops and you are wafted back to a mythical 1950s Britain of giant sandcastles, housewives in flowered pinnies and attractive children playing cowboys and Indians. It's not surprising that this rose-tinted dream plays well with her native audience; but equally unsurprising that it's taken her 15 years to venture into the very different environs of the Middle East.

"We weren't at all sure when we were first approached to have a shop," she admits. "We had absolutely no idea how the look was going to sell." What was more, the shop's location - inside Kuwait's immense glass and steel The Avenues mall - could hardly be further away from the folksy rural idyll her wares evoke. But it seems Kuwaitis leave the English standing in their appreciation of vintage. "We opened about four months ago and we've had the most fantastic response," she says excitedly. "We started quite cautiously, but now there is actually a waiting list of about 260 people for the homewares. The mugs and bedding are selling really well, and people seem to love the big, bright floral prints."

The sewing paraphernalia (she sells pincushions in the shape of flowerpots of African violets, and sewing baskets dolled up to look like rose-covered cottages) are also going down well. "I think it's because sewing and knitting has suddenly become trendy," she points out. "Young girls everywhere think it's fun to customise T-shirts and jeans, and make presents for people - just as I did when I was a teenager. In those days, you didn't buy things for their label at all. I think the effect of the credit crunch is that we'll see much more invisible branding which would be rather nice."

As a result, the company is now looking to roll out more stores elsewhere in the Gulf. "It's in the very early stages, but we feel it is definitely worth doing, possibly in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. But we are very reliant on our partners to tell us where the appropriate places would be," says Kidston. We have met in her brand-new open plan office. It, too, is very un-Kidston on the outside; a modern, architect-designed space in a distinctly urban corner of west London. Rather defiantly, the walls have been papered with one of her own prints of tiny red buses, the supporting columns are painted in rainbow shades of pink and green, and the chairs in the waiting room are scarlet with polka dots.

At first sight, Kidston, 50, is as elegant an English rose as her wares: brown-haired, blue-eyed and soft-voiced, with a charmingly diffident manner. But that diffidence cloaks an acute business brain and a formidable determination to succeed, which has allowed her to turn her passion for prints into a global business of more than 30 shops around the world and a turnover this year of £30million (Dh110million).

She's certainly come a long way from the little girl who liked to play shops with the contents of her mother's store cupboard. Nevertheless, her childhood remains her strongest source of inspiration. Her parents were wealthy - her father worked for the family shipping firm. Kidston and her elder sister and younger brothers ran wild in their large country house, which was also home to numerous pets, including a donkey that was allowed to have tea in the sitting room. School was never a priority (until she was seven, she was taught by a neighbour in the mornings) - the assumption

Being that as a girl of a certain social class, she would not need to earn her own living. "I wasn't really given any career advice; it was presumed that we would just get married. And I think my parents thought it was more important that I knew how to look after the dogs and rabbits," she admits. Wistful echoes of this halcyon period still recur in her designs: the rose pattern of the nursery curtains, for instance, or the pale blue of her family's kitchen are constantly reinterpreted on her ironing board covers and biscuit tins.

After leaving school, she dismissed the idea of university. "I'd heard you could earn really good money working in shops," she explains. "I couldn't understand why anyone would want to go to university when they could be earning money." Instead, she headed to London where she did the window displays in Laura Ashley (as much an indicator of the zeitgeist 30 years ago as Kidston is today). But her charmed existence came to an end when her beloved father (the parent from whom she inherited her eye for design, she says) died of cancer when she was 19. This "very shocking and utterly unexpected" blow not only shattered her family but also caused Kidston to re-think her career plans. Earning money was now a necessity. "I felt rather aimless," she admits.

Having done up her own flat in Earl's Court in trademark style (she remembers a white Formica kitchen and curtains patterned with violets), friends asked her to revamp their living spaces. Her father's cousin, Belinda Bellville (founder of the fashion house Bellville Sassoon), suggested that she go into interior design professionally. Eventually, she wangled herself a job with Nicky Haslam, the man responsible for the living spaces of everyone from Bryan Ferry and Ringo Starr to Rupert Everett and Rod Stewart. (Kidston recalls Stewart as particularly hard to please - "he'd worn all the materials we showed him for his furniture. We wanted to give him a tartan sofa but he'd worn it, we had leopardskin for a stool but he'd worn that. The only thing he hadn't worn was English chintz, so we gave him a chintz house?") According to Haslam, his assistant's sense of colour was unrivalled.

After three years, Kidston set up an interiors business with her friend, Shona McKinney, and completely revamped the Chiswick house of Hugh Padgham, a record producer who worked with Paul McCartney, Sting, David Bowie and Phil Collins, and who created the "gated" drum sound that dominated 1980s pop. (You can hear it on the Cadbury's gorilla ad, she informs me proudly.) He was a bachelor, so she did his house up in muted shades, without any swags, bows or rosebuds. Then they fell in love, and she moved in and promptly redecorated. They have been together for 15 years and will eventually, she insists, get married. "The problem is the dress," she sighs, "I've never really imagined myself in a bridal outfit."

It was Padgham who encouraged her to set out on her own and give up interior design in favour of owning her own shop. The first Cath Kidston shop was launched in 1993, and introduced a rather sceptical audience to her rose-patterned world. She made ironing board covers and laundry bags out of vintage dress fabrics and jazzed up tatty old furniture with bright gloss paint. "It was a big risk", she says. "Florals weren't at all fashionable, but I wanted to show people that they could be funky, not frilly."

It was hand to mouth at first, but Kidston kept going, encouraged by the approval of her own personal design heroes. "Vogue magazine editors and even Miuccia Prada would come in and buy things. I knew it was just a question of being patient and waiting." Some five years later, the rest of us caught up with her old-fashioned aesthetic; the rest is design history. Kidston may seem to have led an effortlessly gilded life, but she has surmounted difficulties that might have sunk a lesser woman.

Just as her shop was at last becoming successful, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, the disease of which her mother had died a few years earlier. She later discovered that other female relations had also died from the disease, but nobody had told her about it - such distressing topics being not for open discussion. Kidston battled cancer successfully, though it's not a topic she wants to discuss, understandably; neither is the fact that she and Padgham have no children of their own.

"If there's nothing you can do about it, that's the way it is," she says, curtly. Instead, she is stepmother to Padgham's daughter, Jess, 16, and devoted to her Lakeland terrier Stanley, whose alert figure and white coat adorns many of her wares. Anyway, Cath Kidston makes no pretence of living her own dream. A Cath Kidston woman lives in a pretty cottage or perhaps a smart London terrace, does her own ironing (on a floral ironing board cover) and probably doesn't have time for a job alongside all that baking and child-rearing.

Kidston, on the other hand, dwells in Restoration splendour by the Thames, in a house furnished with vintage fabrics and graphic art, with a lawn that slopes down to the river's edge. They also have a house in the Cotswolds and move in somewhat exalted rock and screen circles. But, Kidston says, it's all wasted on her. "I was introduced to Brad Pitt once, backstage at a rock concert, and I didn't recognise him," she confesses. She also frankly admits that she's far too busy running her multi-national business to spend hours toiling over a hot stove. "Hugh's lucky if he gets a takeaway, quite honestly," she says. "I'm not a domestic goddess."