What do you get for the person who has everything? Take a visit to Connolly. Perhaps London’s most stylish shop, it is a vault of beautiful things — endless objets d’art, but also more usual items refined past the point of rationality. A fondue set with antler handles. The world’s most elegant set of dominoes. Salt and pepper cellars whose weight might only be second to their cost. Or how about an oyster shell tray for caviar, with matching mother-of-pearl spoon? No, no, no. What you really want is the handmade, hand-knitted, cashmere cable crew necks. Only eight are produced each year. They are, however, reliably a sell-out.
Ralph Lauren once declared Connolly his “favourite store in the world.” It is not hard to see why. Or smell why, for that matter: the shop, with its scent of leather and wood-smoke and tobacco, smells the way you imagine a forest-bound country house might, if it were owned by a racing driver from the 1950s.
You’re gathering, perhaps, that this is not somewhere for a bargain. Those one-of-eight jumpers? £3,500. But the Connolly shop, around the corner from Savile Row on Clifford Street, does not have an uncomplicated backstory of riches. It began life in the decidedly unglamorous surroundings of a tannery, in 1878. Creating fine leather goods from raw animal hides is hard, dirty, unedifying work. But the Connolly family got stuck in: soon they were considered Britain’s greatest leather-workers. It was Connolly leather that was fitted into Rolls-Royces and Concorde and the desks of the British Library; Connolly leather that made the grade for the green seats of the House of Commons and the red of the Lords. The Queen sat on Connolly when she travelled in her Coronation Coach.
The ground floor at Connolly
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This was the brand Isabel Ettedgui met in the early 1990s. “When I left the World of Interiors, I started an advertising agency and Connolly were one of my clients,” Ettedgui says. “I just fell in love with this family — and their business.” Though the brand was busy with the automotive side of the business, “I said: ‘You know you have a retail brand here. It’s for men! It’s the cars, the history, the Houses of Parliament, the Ferraris, Rolls-Royce…’” And did they? “No! They’d never considered it,” Ettedgui says. “I think they were embarrassed that they were in the trade…”
But she talked them round, opening the first Connolly shop in a former stable, on Grosvenor Crescent Mews. Meanwhile, the Connolly family were seeking to expand — with disastrous consequences. “They got into trouble in America, they got into bed with the wrong people…” says Ettedgui, carefully and sweetly.
It was more than that, and the company was soon put up for sale. “My husband Joe said: ‘You’ve put so much into this business, I’m going to buy it’ and they said they’d rather we had it than anyone else.” It helps that Joe was Joseph Ettedgui, the fashion titan behind Joseph. “And then he opened a huge shop in Conduit Street, he upped the fashion, broke the rules a bit for me…”
The yellow room looking into the gallery space
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The shop was a hit, but pancreatic cancer came for Joseph and when he died in 2010, Ettedgui decided she would close. “People began asking if I was interested in selling the name and … no. I’d put so much time into it.”
Did she think her time with Connolly was unfinished? “I don’t know why you stick with something. Maybe it’s like a bad relationship,” she says, erupting into a cackle. “You stay with it, hoping it’ll get better…”
Although she owns the name, she licensed it back to the Connolly family, who revived the automotive side of things for special projects (“Within a week, we were back with Ferrari”), because, she says, “We’re entwined, we’re like an extended family, and it’s very important to each of us that the other is there.”
Connolly’s objets d’art and other goods for around the home
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Motorbikes and oil paintings
Inspired, Ettedgui looked for a building, and found the old Alison Jacques Gallery on Clifford Street. The 1730 pile is a handsome townhouse, with a flat on top for Ettedgui. There were hints it was the one: she signed the lease on her and Joseph’s wedding anniversary. Gilles and Boissier, the Parisian studio, was called in to fit it out. In the basement and on the ground floor, it is mostly clothes with the odd curiosity — racing goggles, say, the kind Stirling Moss would have worn, or an ashtray designed for a yacht; it sits on a pouch of waterproof leather and will never tip over, even in rough seas. The first floor is especially interesting. “I put so much knitwear, outerwear and beautiful things on the other floors, I’d run out of money,” says Ettedgui, “So I made this a gallery instead.” A roster of artists pass through, with everything for sale. It is all sorts, from motorbikes put together by Moroccan artisans to oil paintings depicting Ettedgui’s beloved Greece.
It has been an up-and-down journey, Ettedgui nods, but after nearly a decade, this is how Connolly should be. It has settled in. There’s a store in Japan and New York is next. She acknowledges that perhaps the prices aren’t for everyone but she hopes it is still egalitarian: “My team are knowledgeable, kind and offer proper service. I think people have forgotten what that’s like.”
Besides, she says, “a lot of people will pay if they know the people making the goods are being paid properly, which is crucial to us.” Her year is spent working with producers, finding what’s next, updating designs. “So much is made by hand,” she says, pointing to the shelves. “I mean, this is not AI designing your wallet. I think Connolly means … when you buy it, you have it for life.”