Hendy’s Home Store
Alastair Hendy - www.aghendy.com
Does your story start with food and cooking?
Alastair. It certainly does. Both my parents worked full time, my dad in the army, and my mum as an infant school teacher, yet a meal was on the table every night.
We lived a lot in Germany where I had access to travelling around Europe at a young age. I loved cooking as a child; my mother was always a bit of a reluctant cook, so she’d hand it over to me, even at the age of seven or eight. We’d go to a market and find interesting things, then it was up to me to rustle up something delicious. I reckon the food side was encouraged by mum, so that she could put feet up on the sofa and have a snooze. My father was never a cook, all he could manage was a show-off prawn cocktail. A lemon wedge stuck on the side, and we were so impressed.
If you wanted to get on in life, catering college was not an option when I was at school, and so I didn’t make a living out of food until much later. Instead I went to art school, to do theatre and costume design at Central Saint Martins with much dressing-up as a New Romantic: leather jerkin with belt, wool tights and green suede lace-up Robin Hood style boots from PX. PX was such a cool shop. Art school was all about how cool you were – not about what you were doing, I think. After that I worked for Habitat Birmingham as a display manager, living up in the Midlands at the time. I was doing a bit of antique dealing, buying stuff for nothing in junk shops and then at the weekends flogging it for loads at antique fairs. I found I could earn more in a weekend than I did the whole month working at Habitat, and I thought, blow that. So I did, and dealt in early to mid-twentieth century applied arts throughout the eighties. Then, just like that, food turned a corner, and started to look more sexy, for a new tv series called Masterchef had sprung on to the TV. Catering had gone and chefs were in.
I got a place on Masterchef. Lloyd Grossman was the host back then; there was a celebrity chef plus another celebrity judge, someone off the telly. I had Robert Carrier, mum was dead impressed, despite having never cooked a single recipe from his book. We didn’t get on that well; he was old-school, and I was flexing young, new-school muscles. He chose his winner to be someone who’d carved mangetout into the shape of fish that swam in a double consommé.
Anyway, it gave me my Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame moment. Then up came Italian Cook of the Year run by BBC Good Food Magazine. I met Antonio Carluccio, he was the judge; I had wanted to meet him for years, for I’d treasured his book A Passion For Mushrooms, which is kinda why I entered the compettion. I was keen on wild food and foraging for mushrooms, having picked field mushrooms with my mum when I was a child.
Antonio liked what I’d cooked, and whispered in my ear afterward that he’d wanted me to win yet his hands had been tied by Dolmio who’d paid him five hundred quid to basically do as he was told! Such a tart, Antonio. Dolmio handed their rosette to another because two jars of Dolmio product were used in a concoction Antonio told me was perfectly revolting. Anyway, I’d cheated; for I’d emptied their tomato sauce out from the jar and replaced it with my own. I couldn’t have Antonio eating Dolmio! I told him that too, and we became friends.
On the strength of that, Antonio offered me a job in his Neal Street restaurant in Covent Garden, so I got out of the old antique thing and into being a chef. Instantly becoming pudding and salad chef, having had no training or, indeed, ever having worked in a restaurant. It was short-lived because I couldn’t live on the pay. But I had ticked that box, and a journey with Antonio had begun.
So, while working in the Neal Street restaurant, I met Antonio’s wife, Priscilla Conran. Priscilla was getting ready to open the first Carluccio’s on Neal Street, this was around 1991. I noticed her struggling with a display, so I boldly moved in and asked; would you like me to have a go at that? We had never spoken to each other before. She replied, what makes you think you can do that? In that way that Priscilla made others tremble. I explained my Habitat job, Habitat owned of course by her brother Sir Terence. OK, do it then she said. She loved it. And we quickly became like-minded friends. After I stopped cheffing at the restaurant, I continued to do the Carluccio’s displays. As the business expanded, I did all the visuals – in-store, at exhibitions, product launches, press shows and so on. And much more - going on to photograph and style Antonio’s books. I spent two decades with them, we were close friends. They’re sadly gone, and a chapter has closed.
It was Angela Mason, food editor of You Magazine, Mail on Sunday, that handed me my first national paper recipe columns, in 1993, and then followed contributions to The Guardian Weekend food pages, through my late friend Deborah Orr, who was the editor at the time. Later I became the Sunday Times Style Magazine Cook, having a regular weekly column.
Then I took up the camera professionally, and the rest is history. I was off, contributing to all sorts of magazines around the world, and in particular, Australian Vogue Entertaining and Travel Magazine. I could do photoshoots of my food, own the whole thing, and then syndicate my work all over the place. You don’t always have to be trained or attend college to learn things. If you love something, you’ll learn how to do it; it’s going to sink in much quicker when you love it.
There is also an interest in travel in your writing.
Alastair. Yes, from recipe writing, I moved into food and travel writing and photography, and found my true home in the culinary world. My partner John and I would take a holiday for four weeks, back in the day when he had more time. We’d really discover a country; travelling all around Asia through the nineties and two thousands. With camera and note-book I would document everything with a particular eye on things. Sometimes it takes someone outside a country to see the country, the detail, the colour, the nuances, and everything that’s going on; you don’t see it as a native. Much of the work I was selling into magazines around the world was travel-related food pieces. It was food-led travel, which is how we travel when we travel anyway. It’s all about the next meal you will eat or the snack on the roadside; it’s all part of the travel bug. It culminated in my book Food & Travels Asia (available through our website).
“The practical is now the new luxury - well, I think so, and I reckon most of our customers think that too.”
What is your connection with Hastings? And how did setting up a shop in the Old Town come about?
Alastair. My connection is through my grandparents, they lived just outside the town. With my parents living abroad, I attended two different boarding schools in East Sussex: Great Walstead School and then Ardingly College; both near Haywards Heath. So many a weekend was spent around Hastings; and so the town feels like a homely fixture in my life. Me and my sister still own our grandparent’s place, a wood cutter’s cottage tucked into Petley Wood, so that has kept the focus for us on Hastings, and that’s where I stay when I’m working at the shop.
I decided to have a shop because it combines everything I do, and have done. So I thought, why not Hastings? Let’s bring people to Hastings and make it more of a destination. It’s been a struggle, and I knew it would be, but then I like a challenge. Because I’ve made it such an experience, people get confused about whether they are in a museum or a shop; the boundaries are blurred.
I’d already bought a property in Hastings in 2006, the Tudor House, which I was still working on when I acquired the shop in 2008. They overlapped, but it was an opportunity not to be missed. The shop’s interior was awful; it had been modernised, it was damp and many inappropriate alterations added. Yet this had positives, for it made it a blank canvas upon which I could create something special. It was crying out to be brought back to something that it might have been.
Living in Shoreditch London, I am next door to the Georgian silk weavers houses of Brick Lane (and also Dennis Severs House). The vernacular of these buildings which are of similar age to my property were my story-board. I like an edge; nothing should be too comfortable. t’s the thrill of escape into another world, the theatre of a space, that has also had a hand in the creation of my shop.
My aesthetic is below-stairs, pared-back and utilitarian; I’ve always seen beauty in a brush, a ball of string, or a pair of scissors. I’m drawn to things that are both beautiful and useful. I think William Morris said something similar. There’s a poetry in the everyday. The unashamed elegance of the domestic is always pleasing and has been my go-to all my life: from the scrubbed tables and ironstone ceramics found below-stairs in country houses to their drab painted cupboards, shelved pantries, exposed pipework and batteries of scullery sinks. It just works.
The shop has incorporated many of these elements, and is a bit like a story book, taking the customer on a journey. Its dust jacket is the dark frontage and windows, opening into paragraphs of rooms that weave a narrative. Seeing customers place their purchases on the counter for wrapping, it’s as though they’ve been on a journey and these are their tales. E-commerce has removed this sensory, serendipitous experience, yet we’ve tried to reflect it back into our highly visual website, where you’ll again discover our complete world, with much more than just products for sale. Such as our 1930s Handy Hints page (sited on Front Desk) for our monthly illustrated practical tip on how to make light work of chores and repairs around the home; the honest charm and make-do-and-mend philosophy of these old advertising cards is a breath of fresh air in today’s throw-away world. We sell a lot of vintage, for this is history you can buy and use. You don’t see this quality in the products made today and they couldn’t be more relevant to today’s planet friendly ambitions.
Others have opened shops that similarly celebrate elevated domesticity, but I like to think my store is more enticing, because I have created so complete a world, which was very much my intention from the outset. An attention to detail to the environment gives authority to the product. I reckon I have a manic commitment to making the every day, food, domestic work, into something extraordinary and firmly believe the everyday to be special and the utilitarian desirable. The practical is now the new luxury, and rightly so. Taking something simple and every-day, like Italians do with say a sun-ripened tomato, and then doing nothing with it but adding some olive oil and then taking pleasure in this simplicity, because you can; the tomato is perfect, the oil is perfect, that’s making the ordinary extraordinary.
And while back on the subject of food, we did have a restaurant at the back of the shop; yet we closed it for the first lockdown and haven’t reopened it. It had a seafood and vegetable-based menu, and we opened for lunchtimes at the weekends only, as an extension of the shop. It was hugely successful, and people keep asking if we’ll open it again, but it’s a difficult thing to run in such a small space – especially when half of your seating is outside. We still get calls daily from people wanting to book a table. It’s like word continues to spread. Shame, they should have grabbed it while it lasted. Such is life.
“We sell simple, plain, straightforward, domestic things; where the everyday is special. There’s poetry in the everyday, and the setting gives the product authority.”
Alastair Hendy / A G Hendy & Co.
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Tudor House
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