Inside the Glastonbury home of Mulberry’s founder

Roger Saul founded Mulberry in 1971. He created their now iconic range of bags, belts and purses, but was ousted from the designer label’s board in the early Noughties. Undeterred, he reinvented himself as the purveyor of organic spelt cereal and flour brand, Sharpham Park. His range of products is de rigueur on every health-conscious Waitrose shopper’s weekly list.

Saul, now 73, can put many of his triumphs in both fashion and food down to Abbots Sharpham, his 268-acre Somerset estate, just outside Glastonbury, made up of a Grade II* Listed 15th-century eight-bedroom main house, two cottages, a deer park, indoor swimming pool – and field upon field of spelt. Here, he produces nearly 1,000 tonnes a year of the grain, a variety of wheat that Saul rightly predicted would become as hip as his handbags.

In the late 1970s, when Mulberry was becoming a global brand, Saul was living in a maisonette on Ladbroke Gardens, in West London, with his first showroom in premises underneath.