Beyond the World's End is a real find. Right at the heart of the famous King's Road antiques shop parade, Pimpernel & Partners specialises in 19th Century French luxury seat-furniture, both vintage and replica, also offering a range of home accessories. Established fourteen years ago, Pimpernel recalls something of the shabby chic of unassuming aristocracy, of the recumbent Scarlet Pimpernel strewn across a sofa at Lord Grenville’s ball ‘after the best of suppers’.
One of the spinster daughters of Louis XV, Mme Elisabeth, was once asked why she had not entered a convent like her sister. ‘C’est un fauteuil qui me perd’, she replied (‘It was an armchair which was my undoing.’) The Pimpernel style is exactly that, the low-slung comfort and relaxed rustic in the Neo-Louis tradition.