Homewares store, interior design business, cooking school, and café – what more could you want from a hyper-colour cottage?

If setting up an award-winning homewares store was a feat of great effort, you wouldn’t know it speaking to Annie Lovejoy.

For 33 years, she has helmed Outdoors on Parade – the impossible to miss hyper-colour, single-fronted cottage on the western end of The Parade.

“Really it started totally by accident,” Annie says.

“We bought the building with my parents. We rented the front out to Blooms, my husband had offices behind it, and we were trying to let the back out as warehousing, so totally never planned to be this.

“After a while somebody asked if they could leave some furniture in here – somebody around the corner at Adelaide Furniture – so we let him, and one of his mates wanted to leave some, all of a sudden, it looked like an outdoor furniture shop [and] I found myself occasionally selling furniture out the back.”

Though the store has changed dramatically since then, the organic nature of the store’s origins and development remains evident in Annie, her staff, and the way Outdoors on Parade is set out.

As Annie details the evolution of her business, from furniture shop, to homewares store, interior design business, cooking school, and, most recently, café, it’s almost as if she couldn’t have stopped the momentum if she tried.

“I kept trying to find ways to use the back space efficiently, and eventually came up with the idea of starting a cooking school, so we started that,” Annie recalls.

“Walking out of the cooking class one day, there was a lady here from Designers Guild in London, and she said ‘I was wondering if you’d like to open a Designers Guild concept store in Adelaide?’ and I couldn’t believe my luck, because I just loved Designers Guild, so that’s what we did, and we gradually became an interior design business.

“The last [change we made] was the café two years ago, which we’d been planning for quite a number of years, and I absolutely love that. If we didn’t have that, I look now and think it wouldn’t be anything without the café, you know?

“It just creates this buzz. Every morning all the [people] from all the offices around here come in… and buy coffee, and then they just keep coming back during the day, plus friends meet here and decide to shop, buy presents together or whatever, it just works so well.”

Outdoors on Parade is certainly part of the neighbourhood

While the many twists and turns that Outdoors on Parade has taken during Annie’s 33 years in business have kept things interesting, the street around her has remained stoic.

“I’ve actually been on The Parade since I was five because my parents had a real estate business up the other end, so I’ve really lived on The Parade all my life. And I have seen a lot of changes, but to me this area hasn’t changed hugely,” she says.

“I would like to have seen it spread down here more in the retail sense, but then things like the internet and things have changed that a lot. Not so many people open up stores now.

“But obviously I love The Parade, and I think it’s a brilliant place. I mean, where do you find a street that has a great football oval, cinema, every kind of store you can imagine, all in one strip, five minutes from the centre of the city? It’s just unique.”

If uniqueness is a key trait of The Parade, Annie, and Outdoors on Parade, is right at home.