Sarah Brown is a family business dating from the 1920s, a bespoke furniture manufacturer which had its origins in London’s Kentish Town, making coaches and coach wheels. For the last 35 years its workshop base has been in Sittingbourne, where its traditional luxury sofas are made from scratch by a team of nine skilled workers using top-class materials such as German beech, duck down and exclusive fabrics from Belgium.
“Our research showed us that the Sevenoaks area was one of the wealthiest in the country, and Ightham in particular is one of the wealthiest villages,” says owner Peter Morgan. He put dots on the map to mark where customers at his existing stores in Tunbridge Wells and Bromley were living, and found clusters of wealthy sofa buyers around Sevenoaks.
Peter, it would be fair to say, is a man who is passionate about his sofas and how they are made, and scathing about his cheaper rivals. “We manufacture about 40 or 50 sofas a month,” he says. The firm has about 20 traditional designs, including several variants of the famous Knole sofa.
“Everything is made to order and it takes a minimum of eight weeks.” Peter is confident from his research that the Sevenoaks area has enough people for whom his price range, which starts at well over £1000 and moves upwards, won’t be a barrier. “If you have a million pound house, there isn’t much point in having DFS furniture,” he says. Unusually among new retailers, Peter decided to buy the freehold of what was a run-down fashion shop at 157 High Street.
Originally he wanted to demolish the building, which dates mostly from the 1920s on a much older foundation, but after planning permission was refused, he carried out extensive renovation instead. Though his shop has been open only a few weeks, it looks as though Sarah Brown will be here for the long term, and Peter has been busy recruiting a local manager to take over running the shop.
