Synopsis
Chantal Coady's laundry room in her south London home used to be a chocolate factory. At least, it was formerly the space - a small, domestic kitchen - where she and an assistant made passionfruit truffles and cherry-studded chocolate bars for Rococo, the Kings Road fantasy chocolate shop she opened in 1983. Now she has two more London shops in Belgravia and Marylebone High Street, the signature blue-and-white boxes are in Waitrose and John Lewis, and her manufacturing is no longer in the laundry room but at a thirty-strong factory in Dulwich as well as Grenada, where she has a partnership with a cocoa cooperative to create fair-trade organic chocolate. "Like most children, after reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I dreamed of having my own chocolate factory. What was unusual was that I actually did it," she says proudly.
Coady is as passionate about her home, a tall, skinny three-storey Victorian house - and the garden square in which she lives, Vauxhall's Bonnington Square - as she is about quality chocolate. She lived there first as a student squatter, then as tenant of a housing cooperative - and now as a homeowner, with her husband, James, the MD of the company, Fergus, 14, Millie, 12, and cat Sootchi, not surprisingly a chocolate Burmese.
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