As a family-run business, Parlour Farm Kitchens proudly trumpeted its ability to deliver craftsmanship, quality and sustainability.
Operating from a stylish showroom and workshop on the fringes of the Gloucestershire town of Cirencester, its marketing pitch was very much targeted to the affluent folk of the surrounding Cotswolds and to well-heeled customers everywhere.
Its website proclaimed: ‘We are so bespoke that if you can dream it, we can build it, and if you can’t, our designers will hold your hand throughout the whole process.’
But now Parlour Farm Kitchens has gone bust, leaving behind debts of more than £2 million.
However, it has emerged that even as its clients were being palmed off over delays to their high-spec installations, boss Dino Mussell and his fellow directors – including his mother Tina Rowley-Mussell – were already setting up a new company with a near-identical name, Parlour Farm Kitchens & Cabinet Makers Ltd.
One furious customer, named only as Lucinda, told The Mail on Sunday that Mr Mussell – formerly landlord of the Wild Duck pub in Ewen, an old haunt of Prince Harry’s – oozed so much charm he could sell ice in the Arctic.
Her dream kitchen – with hand-painted wooden frames and a feature island with breakfast bar – was costing her £50,000. That included £25,000 on units, with the rest going on high-end worktops and appliances, including a coveted Lacanche range, the hand-made choice of professional chefs including Raymond Blanc and Jean Christophe Novelli.
She agreed to pay in instalments up front – but as installation day drew near, the excuses started. Eventually she drove to Cirencester and discovered the business was closed. It filed to voluntarily wind up two months ago.
Lucinda, a mother of three, said that there was no apology when she finally made contact with Mr Mussell.
‘He told me he was expecting to lose more than anyone else and that I should speak to the administrators,’ she said. ‘His attitude was clear – it was very much “poor me”.’
She was able to get her money back because she had paid the firm on her credit card. Others were not so lucky.
One businesswoman said she and her husband invested nearly £60,000 in a new kitchen and utility room last summer.
She said: ‘We saved for many years to do this project. We’ve lost an awful lot of money. Financially, we are broken. And no, he hasn’t apologised.’
Another pensioner lost £20,000 after asking the firm to give her kitchen a makeover. She said Mr Mussell wanted to ‘squeeze more and more out of me,’ adding: ‘He told me most customers spend £80,000 to £90,000.’
A fourth woman, who spent more than £30,000, wrote online: ‘I have learnt from the insolvency practitioner that I am unlikely to receive one penny back. I am broken.’
Former Parlour Farm Kitchens employees say they were being pushed to make sales as late as November. They now realise the business was struggling and that the new company name had already been registered.
One creditor said of the directors: ‘They live a very flash lifestyle, and that clearly hasn’t suffered while we are battling to get our money. I am owed several thousand pounds. I know he [Mr Mussell] whines about how he has supposedly lost a lot of money himself, but he has made a decent chunk down the years.
‘We knew they were in trouble, everyone did, but they kept on taking these sizeable deposits for work on new projects even when it was obvious there was no way they were going to survive.’
When The Mail on Sunday called at Mr Mussell’s £750,000 home in a village just outside Malmesbury, in Wiltshire, two stone lion busts – similar to those that once stood outside the company showroom – bookmarked the electric gates. There were horses grazing and a stable block with more than half a dozen boxes and a mud-splattered 4×4 with a personalised plate.
Mr Mussell – who in 2021 proudly received a Manufacturing Guild Mark, which recognises excellent furnishing manufacturers – declined to comment.
A few miles away at a £1million barn conversion, his mother’s Porsche with its personalised number plate was parked outside the glass double doors. She said: ‘There is a lot of information out there which is accurate, but there is also an awful lot of information which is not.’
Additional reporting: Simon Trump
