It's A mid-week morning but Avoca Handweavers, at Kilmacanogue in Co Wicklow, is fairly jammed with mammies and toddlers, and what looks like a couple of coachloads of elderly tourists. There's a feeling that Avoca's flagship outlet is always busy, with the stay-at-home parents of South Dublin and Wicklow coming in for lunch, and the busloads of tourists year-round, looking for rugs and geansais.
For four years now, according to Amanda Pratt, one of the company's directors, Avoca has been looking for a Dublin city-centre site. For a sum of £800,000, they have just found it in the former Makulla's shop on Suffolk Street: a large premises on several floors. This will be their ninth shop, and will share flagship honours with the rural Kilmacanogue outlet. The opening date is projected for April, and the shop will have a restaurant, as well as its range of pottery, books, gourmet food, home-furnishings, and of course, lots of traditional wool-based clothes and throws. Kilkenny Design, within baahing distance in Nassau Street, is likely to be viewing the competition closely.
Avoca will be hoping its new clothing line, appropriately called Hope and Thimble, will draw in punters who are not necessarily looking for yet another big woolly geansai, or a bright tartan rug. Amanda Pratt, with her boho look of hair in plaits, bright pink watch and runners, and long plum velvet coat (her own design), is the designer. "I've wanted to do my own range for a long time," she explains, still looking distinctly amazed at how fast it's all happening.
At Trinity, she studied History of Art and Archeology. A postgraduate degree in the London College of Fashion followed. For many years, Pratt has designed various elements of the Avoca look, including its classic clothes, knitwear, and pottery. Her parents, Donald and Hilary, had bought Avoca back in 1974 and built it up: there are now five family members involved in the company, which employs 360 people.
The impetus to produce a showcase came when Pratt heard of a cancellation at the major wholesale clothing show, Pure, in London this September. "The stuff was only half finished at the time, but London made us hurry everything up." Over the three-day show, buyers came, looked, went, and came back with chequebooks and diaries.
Among them were Liberty, House of Fraser, and Fennicks; an impressive roll-call under any circumstances, but for a first collection from a first-time designer, it is the equivalent of a first-time novelist getting both a large advance and a good publisher. At the end of the first day, she went back to her husband and twin daughters in their London hotel room, who had travelled with her for moral support, with £30,000 worth of orders under her oxter.
`I can't express how removed from our expectations it was," says Pratt, who couldn't eat for three days before the show. She explains the line is called Hope and Thimble - hope because she had hoped to be a clothes designer since she was seven, and thimble because of all the hand-sewn details on the range.
The line that will appear in the spring in the British shops will also be carried in Avoca itself: at the moment, all the cutting and sewing is being done in Kilmacanogue itself - other arrangements may have to be made when the line becomes established.
There is a lot of linens: long, lime-green dresses trimmed with pink ribbon; pink bias-cut shirts; loose, cornflower-blue jackets. Each piece has details: tiny ribbon roses for buttons; ribbon-trimmed skirt hems; organza pleated edging on cardigans. It's a loose, comfortable look that suits layering, with outlines kind to the figure. Pratt guesses it's for women up to their 40s.
At the moment, the Kilmacanogue shop is carrying a small Hope and Thimble winter-look line. Among it are full-length velvet hooded coat-cloaks in scarlet, midnightblue, and ivory (£195); blue cotton cardigans edged with pink scalloping (£74.95); pink or blue thermal long-sleeved thermal t-shirts with beaded detail (£49.95); and a range of wool and velvet devore scarves, trimmed with fragments of embroidery, mirroring, or applique (£49.95). It's a very feminine, pretty look: the unusual and beautiful long coat-cloaks in particular look like a key long-term investment.
Pratt will be designing two collections a year once the line gets established. At the moment, she is a bit at a loss as to how she will find the time to do it, as well as to help oversee the conversion of the Suffolk Street outlet. "But I've wanted to do this all my life," she stresses. "I keep saying it, but I'm still in shock over it all."
