Hattie Vail was born in England and brought up in the Yorkshire Dales. Her grandmother, Grace Corcoran, was a dress designer in the 1930s and 1940s in London's Mayfair. When Hattie was a young girl she would lie on her mother's bed and study her grandmother's sketches, which had been salvaged from the air raids of the Second World War. These sketches, of her grandmother's elegant designs, were the source of hours of dreaming for Hattie, who sensed in her grandmother a kindred spirit. Her mother Robin had saved her wedding dress and going-away outfit designed and made in her grandmother's atelier on Bruton Street, and these were reverently tried on and posed in whenever possible. Hattie's two younger sisters became the rather unwilling candidates for endless games of dressing-up and many a "wedding" was held along the riverbank, with armfuls of cow parsley as the bridal bouquet. After mastering her grandmother's old sewing machine, Hattie began "whizzing up" clothes for her sisters and herself, using fabrics bought at the local market stalls and occasionally the old curtains. Hattie was opened in the spring of 2003 and with great pride several of her grandmother's sketches were hung above the fire place. Hattie lives in Ojai with her husband Sam, sons Ben and Jake, and Buck, the English Bull Terrier.