Happy Christmas, it’s been a great year here at deVOL…………
22nd December 2015
All the images in this post are scenes of Cotes Mill the home of deVOL and what gives us all our inspiration, mostly taken by Tim.
The year is coming to an end, people will have memories but sometimes it can seem like life just flies by without us stopping to think about the good things and what we have done or seen or experienced.
It’s been an amazing year for us all here at deVOL, we have been lucky enough to meet lots of new people who now work here with us. Edward has helped open up the ceramics studio and after lots of hard work he has finally got a beautifully individual sink, one of many I am sure. The ceramics studio is a wonderfully atmospheric place, we hope by this time next year we will have handmade tiles and dozens of beautifully organic pots and bowls.
We have celebrated our first year having a London showroom, all the lovely people down there are enjoying a completely different way of life. They have swapped mill ponds and country pubs for pop up bars, all night markets and street food. The Clerkenwell showroom is a pleasure to visit, so very different from Cotes Mill yet still full of charm. Like Cotes Mill it is in a unique position, the beauty is different but in my opinion just as inspiring and exciting.
We have done more photo-shoots than ever before and Tim and I have been welcomed into so many of our customers amazing homes, we have seen and experienced parts of London that we never knew. As creative director this is such an important part of my job, I get to see how deVOL works in peoples homes and what a fabulous job all our designers do in creating these beautiful rooms for all our customers, it is so inspiring and rewarding.
Seeing a deVOL Kitchen in someones home is a reminder of what a great thing a deVOL cupboard is!! We actually make all these kitchens right here in Leicestershire, every single piece. All the guys and girls who work in both our Loughborough and Cotes Mill workshops are amazingly talented and hardworking people. This talent and dedication goes right through the kitchen process and much of it goes unnoticed – but in between making a cupboard and photographing it there is so much going on. Our guys in production, project management and installation make the whole process work about as smoothly as you could wish for. John, who has been here at deVOL longer than most is a legend, if you see him away from his desk it’s Christmas!! John and his team keep all the balls up in the air from the moment a customer pays their deposit to the final closing of the door after the last fitter has left, incredible. Talking of fitters, they are often the culmination of our customers deVOL experience so this is a massive finale and it has to be done immaculately and it is.
One of the highlights of our year was designing the amazingly wonderful, absolutely favourite new Sebastian Cox range. A crazy good part of working at deVOL is designing and working with truly lovely people like Sebastian Cox and seeing the awesome talents of all the creative people at deVOL. A new kitchen range designed, made meticulously by Ben Creed the Master!! and exhibited at the very cool Clerkenwell design week, what an achievement. We have gone on to fit a rustically lovely display here at Cotes Mill, sell lots of these beautiful cupboards, photograph them and been featured on Remodelista as Kitchen of the week three times this year (twice for Sebastian Cox).
Another highlight was welcoming two beautiful new babies, Jo one of our loveliest kitchen designers had a baby and then flew off to spend two years in Chicago taking little Martha with her, we really hope she has fun and comes back to deVOL one day. Then Robin our Managing Director and his wife had a beautiful little girl, Flora, she’s a lucky little lady to have Robin as her Dad. Robin is the most calm, hardworking, dedicated man you could wish to meet and he is our Managing Director, his way of working is a lesson to us all.
We finished the year off with a party for a local Charity called the Peter Le Marchant Trust. What can I say but, wow, from the lady who began the trust over 40 years ago to all the volunteers, these people are amazingly selfless. They offer exciting day trips and holidays on the waterways of Leicestershire, for people of all ages with any kind of disability or serious illness. The trust have three specially adapted boats, which allow disabled or seriously ill children and adults to enjoy a very special outing with their family and friends.
I’m sure I will keep on remembering other things I should be mentioning from the past year, but I suppose underneath all the stuff that goes on is the real spirit of deVOL. That has to be down to Paul and his tireless desire to create more than just a place to work and a great product, a place which makes you feel good about the world. Paul buys cronky old tractors just for fun, so the guys who do the ground work have something a bit different to play with. He builds cabins and buys boats for people to play about on the water, he makes pontoons out of old plastic barrels so you can pull yourself across the water to a little island in the middle of the River Soar. He makes homes for the ever growing families of birds we have here at the Mill just because it makes the place feel alive and beautiful. He has transformed an old unloved building ‘Cotes Mill’ into a thriving, inspirational place for people to work and visit and he has filled it with lovely people and that’s just this year !!!
So that’s a little round up of some of the highlights of 2015, Happy times for the rest of this year and all of next.
