Sophie Sellu kept her own name under wraps for the first year or two of her woodworking business. Potential stockists were taken aback when the appointment booked as Grain & Knot turned out to be a girl. “I wanted the products to stand on their own,” she says. And they did – first her hand-carved spoons, which have been stocked by Liberty and used in photo shoots for cookery books, and, more recently, the elegant, sculptural brushes she makes at her home in Crystal Palace, south London.
She had always been hands-on, always enjoyed woodwork at school (and her father was a surgeon, so perhaps there’s a natural feel for the knife), but her degree in interior design at Manchester School of Art ended up leading her into a job in…