Aesop Cambridge

Like the binding of an antique book, the shopfront is the hue of well-worn leather. Using ancient and pioneering techniques, local plant matter is the interior’s primary material. Oversized shelves are made from English freshwater bulrush harvested and woven by Felicity Irons and her team at Rush Matters, who have brought this archaic and yet renewable practice into the twenty-first century. The bulrush is hand-cut from long punts on the River Great Ouse in Cambridgeshire, then air-dried and sun-bleached before being braided into furniture at the nearby workshop. Other shelves are formed from hemp—grown just twenty miles from Cambridge—pressed with resin. This warm, dense, tactile material is also inlaid into cabinetry, recalling the burnished surfaces of old writing desks. Underfoot, nineteenth-century floorboards are polished with two hundred years of footfall.