Paula SUtton Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everybody. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe. I'm your host Kerry Diamond. Today's guest is the wonderful Paula Sutton who some of you might know as the stylish personality behind Hill House Vintage. Paula was a busy mom working in the fashion world in London. When she and her husband decided to move to the English countryside, Paula suddenly had an entire country house to decorate and not a huge budget, do she began to frequent flea markets, antique shops, and boot sales.
Boot sales, that's not a tradition we have here in America. Anyway, Paula documented everything on her blog and the rest is history. Paula's first book was just published and it's called Hill House Living: The Art of Creating a Joyful Life. What does Paula mean by a joyful life? Well, she's going to join us in just a minute to tell us, so stay tuned.
Today's show is presented by Kerrygold, maker of beautiful butter and cheese with dairy from Irish grass fed cows. Cookie season is upon us, right bakers? So if you're looking for the best butter for your baked goods, look no further. We'll hear more from Kerrygold in just a minute. Speaking of baking, the Cherry Bombe holiday baking extravaganza is about to get underway. Don't miss these talks, demos and panels, including our second annual cookie queen panel on Wednesday the 8th at 3:00 PM on Zoom. It is free and open to all. For all of our holiday events and recipes, visit cherrybombe.com. Thank you to Kerrygold, William Sonoma and California Prunes for their support. Now a quick word from our friends at Kerrygold, then we'll check in with Paula Sutton.
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Kerry Diamond:
Paula Sutton, welcome to Radio cherry Bombe.
Paula Sutton:
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
Kerry Diamond:
It is an honor. I've been a fan of yours for a little while now. I also love anyone who has left the fashion industry to go on and do interesting things. I used to be at Harper's Bizarre back in the and Women's Wear Daily. I loved reading that you had been at Elle and Elite Models, and I wanted to just start from your professional beginning. How did you wind up in the fashion industry?
Paula Sutton:
Well, my goodness, my parents would ask the same thing because, of course, my parents always wanted me to go into law or be an accountant or something very sensible. And the compromise we had because when I was a teenager, I wanted to get into interior design. I'd looked at wonderful magazines on interiors for years. My mother used to actually get lots of sort of country life magazines, looking at old houses and beautifully furnished houses. And so I was getting quite obsessed with that and I thought, "Oh, interior design, what a wonderful profession that would be." And my parents said, "Well, we don't know what that is. You decorate your own home. Who on earth... what are interior designers?"
The compromise was, at first, architecture, but I didn't get the grades to do architecture. So then I had to twiddle my thumbs, and I did a degree in town planning with a little bit of architecture on the side, but within out the year or so of studying, I realized it really wasn't the thing. My heart wasn't in it because, really, what I wanted to do is I wanted the color and the excitement of, of fashion or ,of interiors not actually like the building blocks of what that meant.
After I finished my degree, I decided, "I'm going to give it a go. I'm going to give it one year of trying to be either in the interiors industry or the fashion industry. And then if it doesn't work, I'll be sensible as my parents have asked me to be, and I'll retrain to be something that they would approve of."
I started as a intern at Elite model agency in the press office, and I didn't leave. I stayed there for about four or five years and I worked my way up to the head of press. It was just a very exciting time. It was the time of the supermodels, and I was going to Paris and I was talking to magazines and newspapers on behalf of Elite Premier as it was then in England. It was just an amazing time, and I knew that the fashion industry at that point in my life is where I wanted to be. After different sort of jobs and many years within the industry, I ended up at Elle magazine, which was where I was until I left London. But I was at Elle magazine as the bookings editor so I was the person who organized all of the shoots and all of the cover shoots and the beauty, and I was completely submerged with the crazy world of fashion at Elle for about eight years.
Kerry Diamond:
So many people in fashion wind up being very entrepreneurial.
Paula Sutton:
Do you know what I think it is? I think that you are around so many creative people, for starters, and you are around an industry that creates a fantasy. So whether it's fantasy in clothes and how models look or, or setting that scene of a beautiful home, you are around that the whole time. It sort of seeps into you and you. When you're working in that industry, you know that this isn't real. You know that this fantastic 12 page spread where people are in ball dresses in gardens isn't necessarily how people live, but it stays with you, doesn't it? And I think there's always that sort of eagerness to sort of bring some of that magic to life in your own way. I'll wear a ball dress now doing the garden.
Kerry Diamond:
Which is what we all love about you. It's so interesting when you talk about the fantasy, I feel like you've made the fantasy reality. Maybe that's why so many of us love what you do.
Paula Sutton:
I had so many images stuck in my head of my time in fashion, but when I came to the countryside and I made my home surrounded by fields, and it's all very quiet and sleepy around where I live, I was just remembering all of this imagery and all of these wonderful sort of crazy fashion shoots. You just start trying to live life a little more beautifully, and you start remembering how those things looked. sometimes it's all very experimental, isn't it, and also my biggest thing, it's all about having fun. I just really enjoyed the idea of growing my flowers and baking my cakes and also doing setting the whole scene with it, dressing up with it and really enjoying and indulging myself within it. When it's yours, you can do anything. You can be as crazy as you like, can't you?
Kerry Diamond:
When did you start dreaming of having a country house?
Paula Sutton:
I probably started dreaming from a very early age. When I was in my early teens, as I say, my mother used to buy these country life and country living magazines. I used to pour over them and just loved this image of these grand old English houses in particular, with lovely formal lawns and people playing croquet on the lawn and having tea on the lawn. I used to have this fantasy life in my mind that wouldn't that be gorgeous to live like that? And then, of course, life takes over and you don't have croquet on the lawn. You don't have tea on the lawn every afternoon. You are in a boring office in the middle of central London, which is exciting when you're younger, actually, but it never left me.
I married my husband whose parents came from a different part of England, not London, and then they moved to Norfolk, which is where I live now. And when they moved, my husband and I used to drive up for weekends and have weekends in the countryside. This is in our sort of mid-twenties onwards. We would just feel the calmness come over us when we would get into the car on a Friday evening to drive up, and we always remembered that. We always remembered how calm and quiet it was, because this was in the days before mobile phones, before people could get to you at the weekend. So when you left London, you really left London which was blissful at the time. We would come up here and just have weekends of country walks. They always had lots of dogs, so country walks and cakes in the Aga and big Sunday lunches and pub lunches.
It's definitely a romanticized view of the English countryside, but when you are dipping into it at weekends, you are allowed to have this romanticized view, and so when life took over and we started having children and everything was getting more hectic, I always remembered these weekends that we used to have and how quiet and calm we used to see, which was far removed from how hectic it was at the time. And the dream grew again, and I decided, you know, some, something has to happen. We have to try and capture that part of our memory again because it was such a lovely time.
Kerry Diamond:
So you had a front row seat, though, for London fashion and just the go, go, go that went along with that. Were you ready to walk away from that?
Paula Sutton:
Absolutely. By the time we left, I was very ready. My twin girls were five when we left, and my son was eight. At one point I had three under three, and I was also working full time and just trying to juggle everything. In a way, I'm glad I did it because doing it meant that I was so ready to stop. I knew that when I left London, that when I left that world, I knew it was the right decision. Sometimes you have to taste the hectic side in order to enjoy the quiet, I think. You need to have a little bit of the comparison, perhaps.
Kerry Diamond:
Was there a single spark or incident that led to you saying, "Okay, that's it. We're going to find a house."
Paula Sutton:
Yes. I remember it distinctly, actually. We had a live-in nanny who was absolutely wonderful and she joked one evening, just in passing, that one of the girls had accidentally called her mummy. That was it. I'd actually had pneumonia about six months prior to that, so I'd felt that it was all just getting too much. And then when I heard that, I thought, "No, no, no, no, no. I need to reclaim mummy," and just try and recapture a that I thought was actually slipping away very quickly for them, and that's what we did. That's why we moved.
Kerry Diamond:
How does one even find a country house?
Paula Sutton:
Do you know? It's funny because we left just, I mean, the internet had been around, but people were really getting into looking at properties and looking at things online. I don't think that we would perhaps have moved if it hadn't been for the websites that gather together all of the houses and you can see far and wide and you can move to Australia because you can look at houses in Australia or wherever you want to go. It started with just idly looking, not necessarily specifically looking, but idly looking in an area, and then you start seeing what you can get for your money compared to what you have in London, and once you see it, you can't unsee that.
So we would sort of like trail through and go, "My goodness, we could have this.We've got this postage side garden in London, but over here we can have this." And then, the looking, the idly looking becomes, "Well, we'll just pop up. We're not necessarily going to commit to anything. We'll just pop up and have a look," and once you go and look, then you are lost, aren't you? It's like looking at a puppy and saying, "We're just going to look. We're not going to come back with a puppy." Once you see the puppy, you are going home with that puppy, aren't you, really?
Kerry Diamond:
So how did Hill House become the puppy that won your heart?
Paula Sutton:
Absolutely. Well, we came up... We actually lost four houses. When we were looking, we lost what I would call four dream houses. Hill House was one of the first ones we saw. It wasn't actually quite the right size for us. It wasn't exactly what we were looking for, but it stayed with us because it was so pretty. It was so beautiful. It was snapped up very quickly by somebody else, and then we had three other houses fall through.
I remember saying to my husband, "Right, obviously there's, it's a sign we're not supposed to leave London. This isn't meant to happen. Let's just call and see if Hill House is available. You never know. Something might have happened. It might have fallen through. We'll just call, and if nothing happens, then that's it. We're staying in London. It was never meant to happen." It was a random phone call to the estate agent. They didn't call us. And they said, "Oh, yes, coincidentally, the buyer fell through and it's on the market again." It was that random. We just said, "Right. That is the sign. We're coming. That's it. We want it."
Kerry Diamond:
Were you daunted at all at the prospect of having to furnish a country house?
Paula Sutton:
Goodness, me, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, I wasn't daunted before we moved in. It's only when we actually, the day we in and I realized that our furniture filled one or two rooms and there were a few other rooms. We had beds in a room and then nothing else. And I realized, "Oh my goodness, we've actually got to fill this now," and then it became daunting because we had spent all of our money on buying the house. We didn't have extra money to buy fabulous furniture and redo things straight away, and that's how I became Hill House Vintage. I had to troll vintage markets. I had to troll secondhand flea markets, car boot sales, and country piquants, which actually, really that title only came into England years later, fabulous country piquants, but they weren't around.
It really was just car boot sales people lining up with their cars and lifting up... It's like a garage sale, I suppose, in America, but out of a car boot. Things like eBay and, you know, I just had to think very inventively and cheaply how I could furnish this house and not make it look tatty. I love secondhand furniture. I love antiques. I love vintage, but I wanted to make sure it stayed beautiful as opposed to ropy looking, so that was the challenge. That was the challenge, and it was a fun challenge, actually.
Kerry Diamond:
Paula, what was your aesthetic pre Hill House?
Paula Sutton:
I'd always lived in older houses so, in terms of the architecture of our houses, there were always period details. It was never modern. There were always sort of like uneven floorboards and uneven walls and things like that, which sort of dictates how you live, I find. It was a less colorful, less eclectic version, I think. It was a younger, more sort of matching version of what I do now, I think. Whereas now if the sofa in the chair don't match, it's like, who cares? It's fine. Or if there are a few clashing colors, now I think that's part of the beauty of it. Whereas I think I was a lot more put together, I'd say.
Kerry Diamond:
How about your personal style? I'm thinking of Elite and Elle back in the eighties and the nineties. Everybody was wearing black and minimalist. Maybe that was American fashion and not so much London fashion.
Paula Sutton:
It's exactly how it was here. How I differed was I was always into a sort of retro style, but my retro style in my twenties was a bit more mad men. I had lots of pencil skirts and lots of little chic cardigans, and then the highest heels. I mean, I can't even imagine the highest heels now, because I'm such a Wellington boot girl now, but my goodness, I used to run in four-inch heels and think that was normal.
I remember having a pair, I think it was Mark Jacobs boots. They must have been about five inches tall and I would bind... This is such an awful story. I used to bind my ankles to make sure that they were strong enough to walk in these boots. That's what a slave I was to fashion.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, no. Paula.
Paula Sutton:
I mean, it's crazy to think about it, but honestly, I loved walking in those shoes, but I'd get home and I'd have to lie down for 12 hours because the ankles had to gather their strength again.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. You can't exactly walk on country lawns in five-inch heels today, can you? You would sink right through. So when did you start blogging?
Paula Sutton:
I started blogging within the first year of moving up to Norfolk. It was really because my friends had come up to see me and we'd had that initial burst of fun and enthusiasm, and it's also new and how wonderful is this? I'd got my head sort of sorted out with getting the children acclimatized to being in a new place, and my husband was sorted. He was still commuting back to London.
And then I got to a stage where I just thought, "Oh right now, what about me? I've given up my career. I've given up everything I knew how to do, and I'm sitting here trying to furnish the house, but not really seeing many people or talking to many people."
I had discovered blogs a couple of years prior to this, and I decided, "Well, let me just start a blog. I didn't think anyone would read it. It was just a way of exploring my own. It, it was like a diary, really. It was an online diary. That's what it was meant to be. I took photos, but it was all very casual. I was just emulating what I'd seen other people do, and I thought that's just a nice way to pass the time and to document our new life. That's how it started, and I started gathering up a little community.
Kerry Diamond:
You never imagined you would be an influencer one day with a book deal and a very popular Instagram, all those things?
Paula Sutton:
Absolutely not. It wasn't part of the plan because I didn't know that there was a plan like that. I didn't realize that was a thing, that that was a career choice. I thought it was just a nice bunch of people who wrote diaries. We all read each other's diaries online.
Kerry Diamond:
I love that. Well, I have to say congratulations on your beautiful book because that blog has become, essentially, a book. Hill House Living, I found it was part self-help and part style and design. Was that your intention when you started writing the book?
Paula Sutton:
It was. It's funny because a lot of people have asked, because I take so many photographs, I love taking photographs of interiors and country houses and things, a lot of people asked whether it was going to be a big glossy coffee table book. I love big glossy coffee table books with pages. But I remember thinking that when I first moved to to Hill House, there were so many things I didn't know. There are so many things that I wish I'd known and little projects that I wish I could have done at the beginning that I thought I wanted to do something useful, just something helpful, inspiring. I think those coffee table books with the big, massive glossy pages are very inspiring and beautiful, but beyond saying, isn't this gorgeous, I didn't feel that you learn anything else from it apart from, my goodness, isn't that wonderful? That person's style is gorgeous.
I felt that I wanted to give a bit more because what I'd found with my blogging and with Instagram is that the posts that resonated the most with people were the ones where people could find something from it or be taught something from it, or could share something that they knew better or a sort of variant on how to do something. Those things spark conversations, and my book is really meant to spark conversations in people. Even if it's with yourself, sparking a conversation. Maybe I can make a tomato chutney or maybe I can look in my garden and make a jab or a cake. It was meant to spark conversations as opposed to just be visual and, oh, isn't that lovely, and then put it down and you don't look at it again.
Kerry Diamond:
Your subtitle is The Art of Creating a Joyful Life. I'm curious, what does a joyful life mean to you?
Paula Sutton:
A joyful life, to me, means that you stop caring what other people think you should be doing, should be wearing, should be thinking. It's doing things that bring you pleasure, within reason, and allowing to embracing. I call it embracing the seasons purely because when I was in London, I used to fight the seasons. I would live in a house that was boiling hot the entire time because I couldn't stand being in the cold. I used to say that autumn was my favorite season, and then I'd be grumpy when there were the other seasons. And so you are sort of fighting against things the whole time, and what I found here is that I would find myself looking outside of the window and watching the seasons change and think how beautiful is winter. Isn't that gorgeous?
And then, oh, look at that same tree in spring. Look at the same tree in autumn, the same tree, and really learning to embrace being in the present and being in whatever season or whatever time you are in at the time. It does bring happiness when you stop fighting against things and wishing away time or wishing you were somewhere else in time or in a different place. It doesn't mean you have to be in the countryside, but when you stop wishing away what you are doing now and start embracing it and making the best of what you have, you live joyfully, and that's what I learned to do.
Kerry Diamond:
You dedicated the book to your mother Lydia. Can you tell us what your mother was like?
Paula Sutton:
Oh my goodness. She was absolutely wonderful. She died last year.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, I'm so sorry, Paula.
Paula Sutton:
She came over to England in the early sixties, in 1960, I think it was, with my father. They had this image of coming over for, as most west Indian immigrants, did, they thought they were coming over for three years. Let's make a bit of money and then we'll go back, and of course you end up staying for 30 years. And so my brothers and sisters were all born here.
She always had this image of the English countryside. She used to read Jane Austin novels, and she loved, as I said, these sort of interiors magazines. She always wanted this sort beautiful English garden filled with roses. She loved her gardens and she loved gardening. She had a very romanticized idea of English countryside, which I think she passed on to me. My father's still alive. He lives in Grenada now.
They were always very positive people and when you're a teenager, it's quite annoying when you are saying something's wrong, and they're saying, "Don't worry. It'll be fine." It's annoying when you are a teenager, and I kept saying, "Well, how do you know things are going to be fine? How do you know it's going to be okay? Give me details. I need facts, not just an idea of, oh, it'll be okay." But that's always stayed with me because it's that positivity and feeling that whatever you are feeling or whatever you're going through, that you will come through the other side has got me through many dark or cloudy moments, at least.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you inherit your stylishness from Lydia?
Paula Sutton:
Do you know, my mother enjoyed clothes, but my father is the dandy. He's the one who would have his tailored suits and he'd have his little handkerchief in his pocket and loved his shirts. The tie had to be matching and the socks had to be just so, so I would definitely say that it was my father who gave me the flourish and who gave me the enjoyment of just enjoy your clothes and the exploration of clothes.
Kerry Diamond:
You also said about your mother in the book that you inherited a make-do mentality from her. How would you describe what a make-do mentality is?
Paula Sutton:
I think a make-do mentality is I've never been the sort of person who would buy everything new if I don't have to. Even as a teenager, I used to wear vintage tweed jackets that I got from... It was Kensington market at the time. I'd go around in 1930s jodhpurs and riding boots for no reason. I didn't go anywhere near a horse, but it was because I just loved the aesthetic.
Paula Sutton:
I remember Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. Whenever I dressed at that age, there was always some sort of Hollywood heroine in my mind. One day I'd be Grace Kelly, and one day I'd be this, that, or the other. I remember arriving at university with my jodhpurs and my hacking jacket on. I must have looked ludicrous, but in my mind, it was theatrical. I was living the life. I had this sort of imaginary character in my head. So even as fashion, it was all about, rather than necessarily buying new, it was mixing it up. If I wanted to have a look, I might look in my father's wardrobe opened and grab one of his jackets or steal something when he wasn't looking that I sort of thought, "Oh, that could look quite nice. I might put a few little pin tucks in there and it might look okay.
And then the same with furniture. I think, if I can see a shape or something beautiful that has been pre loved or one of my relatives have had who doesn't want it. I always think, because it's going to history and a story, you want to use that. You want to make it work for you rather than search something new every time. I like to make-do with what I have before I look elsewhere.
Kerry Diamond:
You talk a lot in the book about upcycling, reusing, recycling, and I just thought it was so interesting, because those are all such buzzwords today, but it clearly is something you've always lived by.
Paula Sutton:
Absolutely but also, it's been something I've always loved, but certainly when we came to Hill House, it was necessity. I had a dining room and I was so happy. I was really desperate to have a dedicated dining room because I imagined how I could dress this beautiful room and have candlelit dinners and all those things that you never end up having, but you sort of, in your mind, you think, well, you know, one day I'll have those dinner parties every single Friday. It doesn't doesn't happen, but you hope it will.
I bought round table, which we still have now. I think it was something like £40 or something on eBay. A very cheap table, but it looked grand because it's quite large, and I wanted to get six dining chairs to go with it. I couldn't afford gorgeously upholstered dining chairs, but I could see lots of really good solid shapes on sites like eBay, so I decided, well, let me try my hand at recovering these seats because it's one of the easiest things you can do is to buy a drop seat chair and just cover it with fabric. You can do it very professionally and get the padding and the wadding and everything beautifully done.
Or you can literally just stretch your fabric over, get your staple gun and staple the fabric on it. It can be as well done or as quickly and cheaply done as you want to, so you can go to every level with that sort of thing. But the fact is it can dramatically change how a piece of furniture looks, and it's wonderful. I did that because I couldn't afford to buy the chairs that I might have bought, but what's happened is that I can change those chairs whenever I want to, which is wonderful. Very satisfying.
Kerry Diamond:
Now, Paula, one of the things I didn't expect when I opened your book was to find a section on creative visualization, but it's in there.
Paula Sutton:
Oh, yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Can you tell us what that is and how it helped you?
Paula Sutton:
Well, do you know, it's interesting. My father always used to say that you can't get anywhere without a map. It was a big mantra of his. If you mentioned what you wanted to do in the future or how you saw yourself living, he would say, "Okay, now, start thinking about that and start thinking about how you're going to get there. It doesn't mean that's what you're going to do, but you have to have a map somehow," and that's a lesson that has stayed with me. I love cutting out pictures. I'm very old-school. I think Pinterest and the things that you do online is wonderful, but I love actually having scrapbooks and cutting out pictures and putting it in and it's amazing how sometimes when the things that you are drawn to, you can cut out, put in a scrap and not think about it for five years, and you go back to that scrapbook and you think, "Oh my goodness. That's what I've got now, and that's how I'm living now, and that's the thing that I'm wearing, or that's how I look now."
Sometimes I think you need to bring the elements of life that you want together in a place, put it away, not think about it necessarily, or you can put it on your wall and look at it every day. But once you start evaluating what you want in life or how you see your life going or how you want live, it's amazing how you get drawn to that like a magnet without even realizing it. It's not something that you have to work at too much. It doesn't always work, but in terms of going towards the direction of the life you want, there's only one way of doing that, and that's by kind of knowing what you want to do and putting it out into the universe. My father would call that bit woo, woo, I suppose.
Kerry Diamond:
I love that. All right. Let's talk about the month of December, which I would imagine is a thrilling month at Hill House between the snow and the Christmas decorations. Tell me what your plan is for this December.
Paula Sutton:
My Christmas is always designed around two themes. Well, it's all a very Dickensian theme, actually theme. It's a theme of the ghost to Christmas present where it's the horns of plenty and this abundance of foliage and bountiful nuts and grapes and this wonderful vision of a very Victorian, abundant Christmas.
And then it's coupled with Mrs. Havisham, or Miss Havisham, who didn't ever actually marry in the other Dickens novel. In that image, everything's decaying. It's very beautiful, but it's beautiful decay. And so those two things mixed together, I adore having ivy looking as if it's trailing up the walls and trailing into the bookcase, so those are my Christmas decorations, as if the mantelpiece has been done, but then it's been left for a few months too long, and so things have been growing up the walls, but the ivy that's growing up the walls will be covered in sparkle and little bits of fairy dust.
love getting a lot of my decorations from outside, so I've got holly bushes outside, so I'll sort of traipse holly over the mantels and over the mirrors, but it's all very organic and very from the garden, from the home. And then, also, I love the simplicity of brown craft paper for wrapping my presents because I keep ribbons. I keep every single bit of a ribbon I've ever been given in my life, so my wrapping paper is often quite plain, but then I've got these wonderful velvets and satin and all sorts of beautiful ribbons. That's lovely because sometimes I'll sit there and look at the presents wrapped and I'll think, "Oh, I remember where that ribbon came from, or that ribbon came from that other thing there or gosh, we have used that one the last three years."
It's quite fun, actually. It's a talking point with the family, as we remember where all these pieces of ribbon came from. I try and use as much, or reuse as much as I can around the house as possible. And certainly things from the garden, just because we've got sort of a theme going on that's happened for many years now. It's comforting. It's when the garden starts coming in and being laid across the mantelpiece is when you know Christmas has begun, really.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk recipes because you did include a few recipes. Thank you for that in the book. Do you enjoy cooking and baking?
Paula Sutton:
I came to Norfolk as a mother who baked cakes out of a box and I'm ashamed to say.
Kerry Diamond:
No. You have that in common with millions of people.
Paula Sutton:
When I was very young, from the age of about, I'd say eight, until I was 16, I was always baking flapjacks and cupcakes and always sort of like small portion things. I was always in the kitchen doing that, and then I just stopped. I didn't bake at all from my late teens up until... We moved to Norfolk when I was about 40. But what I would do is I would bake box sets of 12 cupcakes from a box for the children, just to show that I could get that side of their enjoyment over and done with very quickly. And then I moved to Norfolk and I had all this time on my hands and I thought, "Right. This is where I'm going to do it properly. I'm going to revisit my love of baking," because I really did used to love baking.
I started by making a Victoria sponge cake because it seemed like a pretty basic straightforward thing to do, and that's why I've got it in the book, actually. I started becoming quite a dab hand at making this Victorian sponge cake so, because that became quite easy, they started looking crazier and crazier and I just started making them taller and taller and filling them with all sorts of cream and fruits and all sorts of things, and they are all eaten. A lot of people actually ask on the Instagram account, do you actually eat those cakes?
My children and my husband are in the background behind me. As I'm photographing anything, they are ready to pounce. Believe me, not one scrap of that doesn't get eaten, but I discovered this love of baking. So everything I do is perfectly imperfect. They're not the most pristine looking cakes. I admire people who can make these beautiful, perfect looking cakes. Mine look like the cat in the hat. They're tilted to one side or one layer is a bit more stuffed than the other, but I love that. They're fun cakes and their cakes to be enjoyed as well as eaten, so I do, yes. I do love baking.
Kerry Diamond:
I do love, though, how you found your own aesthetic for your baked goods as well as for the house and how they all sort of come together. How about cooking? Do you cook as well?
Paula Sutton:
I do. I love, especially living, as I say, living with the seasons at Hill House, so at the moment it stew season. I love stews and soups at the moment. I don't know whether it's, because you're just drawn to that when it starts getting a bit colder outside, your body is asking for something. So I love stews and soups and then, when it gets a little bit colder, than it becomes pie season. I have these seasonal dishes that I do. It's not so much that you can't cook them any other time of the year, but it's traditions, and I started creating my own traditions that I hadn't had before when we came to Hill House. So yes, I do enjoy that.
Kerry Diamond:
That's such an interesting thing. I didn't put this on my list of questions, but is it ever too late to start creating traditions?
Paula Sutton:
Oh, goodness, no. Not at all. No. It's such fun and they're so heartwarming and what's amazing about creating traditions later on is that your children or your friends and family or whoever you are sharing those traditions with, they remember them. So they last even longer. Even if you've only done something for two years, the third year you'll forget when you started because it's become a tradition. It becomes something that you'll keep on doing.
Traditions are a lovely thing. There's something comforting and something of a return-to-home about doing something over and over and over again. It's not necessarily that you get better at it, although often when you do things over and over again, you get better at it, but it's more that they bring back memories of the last time you did it or the time before, or they bring back memories of who you were with when you were doing that or who you shared that meal with, or who you baked with during that period of time, and it's a lovely thing. As well as tastes and smells, just the act of creating something is a tradition in itself and can bring back beautiful memories.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk food just a little bit more. What are some things you always make for the holidays?
Paula Sutton:
Oh, gosh. Mince pies is a big thing in our house. We've already started making them. By mince pies. I'm not sure if you have the same thing in America, but mince pies, it's not mince meat, although I think the name comes from a time 200 years ago when people would make minced meat into little pies.
But it's sweet. It's raisins and it's apples and it's sultanas. It's all chopped up and it's boiled down with sugar, so it becomes this wonderful fragrance spicy mix. You add your cinnamon and your nutmeg, and then you put them in a little shortcrust pastry case, and they can either be covered with a completely covered top, or you can do a little lattice work top, but they're very traditional at Christmas, and you could have them hot or cold with a dollop of fresh cream, which is always delicious.
Kerry Diamond:
Now, you said you started them already. How does that process work? Are you aging the fruit in some kind of brandy?
Paula Sutton:
Yes, yes. You can do that. At the moment, I've got my mix of fruits that is in a jar. Brandy would be lovely, but I've got grenadine rum which you have to be very careful with.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm making my first fruit cake ever. I have to go buy some fruit and, and the recipe calls for brandy, so I'm going to be soaking my sultanas and my dried cherries and prunes and all that in some brandy.
Paula Sutton:
Exactly. Every so often you give your cake a little drink. I always remember my mother doing that. Every so often, she'd go and give the cake another little drink of the rum
Kerry Diamond:
I'm very excited for this project. What are some other things you make during the holidays?
Paula Sutton:
Well, I always make, for Christmas lunch, it's always the turkey and the trimmings. We go to the very traditional Christmas lunch and lots of lovely stuffing. It's all to do with spice and the fragrances, for me, because my parents came from the Caribbean and my father's still there. It's an island called Grenada, which is the spice isle, and so I grew with everything had nutmeg and everything had cinnamon. We grew cinnamon bark in our garden and everything has cloves. So you know that Christmas is happening in my house because I will put those spices in soups. I'll put them in stews. I'll put them in cakes. I'll put them in anything, so the whole house is constantly smelling of this fragrant mix of spices. We have a lovely chestnut and bacon and leak soup, which is a lovely mix that was sorted by my father-in-law, actually.
It's a lovely mix of autumnal and winter forest foods, really, almost. You put a bit of mushrooms in there, as well, and then that has a hint of nutmeg too, and so that becomes a sort of winter warmer that goes into sort of Christmas.
But autumn and winter sort of meld and merge into one. We have conkie, which is something that's in my book. That's a sort of a cakey pudding that you eat out of a wrapped piece of parchment. It's quite… but, as I say, quite puddingy. It's made with pumpkin and coconut milk and grated coconut and, once again, the spices.
That reminds me of being in England. We have bonfire night, which is around the 5th of November, and it reminds me of standing around the bonfire. You have your jacket potatoes, your baked potatoes that you bake inside the fire, and then afterwards you have the pudding, which is the conkie and you eat it out of the parchment. Once again, it's a tradition. It's a tradition I remember from my parents that would mark the onset the colder months and coming towards Christmas. So, for me, Christmas is all about the spices.
Kerry Diamond:
I think your fans might need a Hill House candle, Paula.
Paula Sutton:
Oh yeah, absolutely. I don't know. Scents is just... I know this is a known thing, but just smelling something just brings memories back into your mind so quickly. I remember my mother smelling of spices in the kitchen at Christmas. So whenever I smell that sort of smell, and you're right, I should have called it Lydia's Candle, perhaps, it makes me think of my mother cooking the Christmas yummies in the kitchen.
Kerry Diamond:
If you ever do that, I'll buy the first one. Tell me about this classic snowball cocktail. You have the recipe for that in the cookbook, and I had never heard of that drink.
Paula Sutton:
Oh my goodness. Well, the snowball is something that I think must come from the 1950s, I believe. It's one of those classics. It's quite a kitsch looking cocktail because it's bright yellow, and then you have a bright red cherry in it. And it's often in a very shallow glass, like a champagne sort of coupe. I used to have them when I was younger thinking I was being terribly sophisticated, and so they just remind me of fun parties, but it's eggnog, basically. It's eggnog with a bit of fizz. It's just a lovely, festive party, fun thing to have. I think that anything you eat, especially around the festive period, anything that you eat or drink needs to have a bit of fun to it. It always makes me giggle when I think of my snowball, so I just wanted to share that with people just because it was just such a fun thing to be drinking. It is alcoholic, so you have to be careful.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, I am very retro in my love for eggnog and I love a coupe, so I will be trying out the snowball this holiday season. So Paula, before we let you go, I would love to know what are you looking forward to in 2022?
Paula Sutton:
Of the biggest things which has got nothing to do, I have to say, it's got nothing to do with food or eating. My companion Coco, we lost my dog at the end of the summer, and I'm looking forward to life with a new puppy. I have to say, I'm sort of holding back for the moment. It's going to be something that I want to give and dedicate a lot of time to having a new member of the family. But my house, Hill House is only complete with a dog, and I really look forward to that moment when I can have my new canine companion, my new best mate.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm sorry about Coco. Coco's and so many of your photos.
Paula Sutton:
Oh, Coco is a legend. She's an absolute legend. She really is the star of Hill House vintage. You see my face now a lot, which is probably very annoying for people, but it used to be Coco all of the time. Coco was the face that everybody wanted to see. I was just the interloper. I shouldn't have been there. It was all about Coco.
Kerry Diamond:
We can't wait to meet the newest member of the family. And Paula, I just want to thank you for your time. You have created such a beautiful thing, not out of thin air, but almost completely from just your imagination and your creativity and gumption, and we all get to benefit from it, so thank you very much.
Paula Sutton:
Thank you. That's very kind. Thank you so much. It's been an absolute joy.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you so much to Paula Sutton for joining us. Look for a copy of Hill House Living: The Art of Creating a Joyful Life at your favorite local bookstore. Also, you can follow Paula on Instagram, check out her YouTube videos or visit her website. A whole world of Paula awaits. Thank you to Kerrygold for supporting our show. I'll be in Washington, DC, on Tuesday night for a special event, celebrating baker Cheryl Day and her brand new book. It's a partnership with Bold Fork Books and is part of Cherry Bombe's holiday baking extravaganza.
Visit cherrybombe.com for more. I would love to see you there. Radio Cherry Bombe is a production of Cherry Bombe magazine. If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more about holiday traditions, check out our podcast episodes with Eye Swoon's Athena Calderone, Dominos Kate Berry, and the one and only Jenna Lyons. I love all those gals. And while you're there, be sure to subscribe to our show. Radio Cherry Bombe is recorded at Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in New York. City. Thank you to Joseph Hazan, studio engineer for Newsstand Studios and to our assistant producer, Jenna Sadhu. Thanks for listening, everybody. You are the Bombe.