Rebecca merrill:Sunless Antiques
On one of the first sunny days of spring, photographer Alex Catt and I headed to St Leonards to spend the morning with the founder of Sunless Antiques, Rebecca Merrill, at the light-filled shop she opened last year with her partner, Adam Freeman. I’d met Adam and Rebecca when I bought a beautiful chest of drawers from them a few months ago. I instantly fell in love with their shop — every single item carefully considered and beautifully curated. Rebecca and Adam both made us feel so welcome; we shared lots of stories and laughter while Alex captured the morning. I hope you enjoy reading our interview with Rebecca.
TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOURSELF…..
I'm Rebecca Merrill, co-founder of Sunless, a vintage and antique clothing and interiors shop in St. Leonards-on-Sea. I studied Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art whilst working for vintage dealers in London and Sunless started just before my graduation in 2015. We opened our first retail space in St Leonard's in 2019 and moved to our current shop late last year. My partner Adam Freeman and I travel all over France and into wider Europe looking for clothing and interior pieces with a certain feeling - sculptural qualities, modernist ideas and timeless, utilitarian forms.
WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY?
When I see something beautiful or very well thought through! At an antiques fair or a flea market but also in a museum, in a book, on the street, in a wardrobe, on a body or in a house.
WHO IS YOUR STYLE ICON AND WHY?
I always come back to the students at the Bauhaus in the twenties, especially the female students. Messy hair, Art Deco knitwear and tailoring. They looked perfect.
WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO AND READING AT THE MOMENT?
I'm going through a jazz phase! So in the shop and also at home, we have a lot of Bill Evans, Chet Baker and Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru playing and also more contemporary jazz, artists like Alabaster dePlume. Reading wise, I've been a little lax recently but I often return to Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata. It's a collection of very short stories written between the 1920s and the 1970s. Each story is a page to a few pages long and are written to seem as if they could fit in the palm of a hand.
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WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT SIDELINE?
I love the shapes! Sideline's clothing has such wonderful cuts. I loved trying out the Leila trousers in the dark indigo denim with the wide leg. Across all of Sideline, I feel like each piece that Ellen designs is so in tune with everything else, from the colour palette, to the construction and even through to the imagery, it's a complete world view.
Rebecca wears: 1. Leila Trousers in indigo, 2. Willow Skirt in patch-work, 3. Say Jacket in indigo patch-work
