Saturday, October 8, 2011

A caravan of creativity called Belle

I feel it is time I wrote about my dear friend Sibella Court who is a constant source of inspiration to me and a squillion others. She fell into my life through our mutual love of textiles and my admiration of her wonderfully talented mother Dee who was a textile queen in her own right. Belle's nomadic life is a whirlwind of twetts, blogging, photographing, writing, workshopping, and designing......the results summersaulting into books, events,  interiors and her gorgeous shop Society Inc. Not stopping for a second, in one day she seems to design and decorate a bar for the Hemmes empire, create an event for Moet, launch one of her books and have a workshop on how to create your own interior.  All with the confidence of a proud lioness. The next day stopping to breathe for 5 seconds she hops on a plane to begin it all again in another country.


She spent some time with me in India and I immediately got caught up with her manic world of exciting action.  One minute we were at the literary festival,next at the Polo...(where I might add she is particularly glamorous and the press constantly turned their cameras onto Belle rather than the horses)then she is being courted by royalty showing her their latest jewellry collection. She is up at dawn travelling round Jaipur in a hot air balloon and by breakfast time her experiences are being twittered round the world. In between she somehow manages to design a new hardware collection for her shop.

She has 2 gorgeous girls back in Sydney called Hannah and Leah who hold the fort and are worked to the bone trying to juggle all the events,books and shoots.  Thank god they are only 20 and have to be multi taskers in technology and creativity.


Last week Belle gave a workshop on how to create your own interior from a totally blank room. Attended by at least 100 riveted women Belle managed to paint a wall indigo, add a dado of wallpaper made from draughtmans blue prints,then proceeded to decorate the walls and room with her kind of props....all the time chatting away about which kind of hooks to buy,what type of staple gun to use,which markets to go to,where to buy fab furniture,fabrics and lighting. This week she has managed to design a 6 star luxury resort in the Maldives and celebrate her birthday in Paris.