The bread heads

Swansea business park is not the obvious place to come in search of your heart's desire, but there you go. Up past the firm selling double glazing, left by the courier company, not far from the limo-hire business, and I've arrived at Toast HQ, a tin shed with Eighties postmodern detailing. I've lost track of the parcels that have been dispatched to me from this building; white cardboard cartons which I've torn from the postman's hand before commencing a frankly shameful frenzy of impatience, scissors and tissue paper. It's really rather thrilling to be here.

On the face of it, Toast is a 10-year-old mail-order company selling women's clothes: well-made, easy-to-wear, rarely obvious clothes in organic cotton, silk georgette and Panama-wool flannel. I've been loopy about Toast's slouchy flares since the year dot (I've got them in moleskin, corduroy, slubby linen and canvas), and there's a black linen top with a subtle pintuck detail, several years old, which I always pull out if I need to do smart. And during a recent camping trip, the only thing that made the trek to the shower block bearable was my cream-coloured dressing gown with fabric-covered buttons and luscious gold and scarlet embroidery around the sleeves, a relic from 2003. 'I love Toast stuff,' sighs a friend with two small children and little time for shopping, only slightly shamefacedly, 'because it does all the thinking for me.' With 150,000 on its mailing list, and 55,000 active customers, we are in good company.

And yet Toast sells more than clothes (and silver bangles and Italian calfskin satchels and pointe shoes in antique silver and carbon - and, from this season, all sorts of desirable things with which you can fill your house: ticking-stripe bedlinens, Anatolian bath towels, English beeswax candles). It sells a pretty potent dream of what life should look like.

Season after season, the company's catalogues spell out a glorious if faintly preposterous little fantasy of pretty, soulful-looking girls living on the edge of somewhere wild - perhaps in a log cabin or a Moroccan town house - and who fill their days wandering around in the fresh air with sheaves of corn under their arm, or rinsing enamel mugs in tongue-and-grooved kitchens. Alongside the shift dresses and yoked blouses, aprons have traditionally featured heavily in the catalogues, and I've had to be rather strict with myself when it comes to resisting the hurricane lamps - which, I can't help feeling, would be invaluable come the lambing season.

All in all, the move into an interiors range is entirely logical, and the new House & Home catalogue will light the touchpaper for countless small domestic ambitions in the Toastcodes thickest with subscribers: Notting Hill Gate, the Shetlands, Chelsea, the Outer Hebrides, apparently. Like the clothes catalogue, House & Home is gorgeously styled - part Eric Ravilious, part Carl Larsson, part Cold Comfort Farm - and littered with fetching props such as tin slipper baths, old Penguin paperbacks and wind-up alarm clocks. It's all about nostalgia, quality and frugality (and yes, I'm aware that even considering forking out £45 for a long-handled beech dustpan and brush in pursuit of frugality means I must be a bit of a plum). Gracious, it even makes ironing - by a window, the steam rising sinuously from the board - look like a rather glamorous activity.

You can't buy the slipper baths or the Penguin novels from the catalogue or website, but you can buy the washed-velvet quilt in rose taupe (£250) and the Herdwick sheepskin rug (£75), not to mention the Pershore purple plum jam (£4.75). Not featured in the catalogue but to order from the Toast shops, of which there are seven nationwide, are a simple trestle table (oak top, ash legs) made by an old friend of the founders on his farm in Exmoor, and the Toast sofa, a chesterfield covered with - what else? - vintage Russian grain sacks (£4,900 for the small version, £5,400 for the large). Kate Winslet bought one at the Oxford store. 'She wanted to buy two, but Sam [Mendes] wouldn't let her,' reports Jessica Seaton, one of the founders.

But beyond the peg bags, sequined cushion covers, herringbone cashmere throws and pan-scrubbing brushes (which, according to the catalogue, are 'made by the visually impaired at a Swedish factory working under the aegis of the national body'), the House & Home catalogue contains all number of pyjamas, in striped flannel or Jacquard-weave cotton. And that's fitting, because as far as Jamie and Jessica Seaton, Toast's founders, are concerned, it all started properly with pyjamas, back in 1997.

Before that there were 20 years spent doing something rather different. Jamie (52, from Lancashire, rimless specs, blue-grey shirt with the cuffs precisely folded back, white trainers under grey carpenter trousers) and Jessica (51, Leicestershire, charcoal pinstriped jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves, oatmeal-coloured cuffed widelegs, beige Bensimon plimsolls - all Toast, naturally) met at Birmingham University as students in the archaeology and ancient history department. They both landed jobs as archaeologists in Wales but fell out of love with the work as fast as they fell in love with the countryside. So the next step was to set up their own knitwear business, enabling them to work from home: a remote longhouse in Carmarthenshire, deep in the woods. Why knitwear? Why clothing, come to that? Hmm, good point. As Jamie says, 'It is a question I ask myself: how did we end up doing this?'

Neither of the Seatons had any experience of design or business. To start with, they assumed Jessica would design and Jamie would supervise the finances. Within a fortnight, they'd swapped roles. 'But it's not that cut and dried,' says Jessica. 'I look at the structure of the collection, the shoot, the catalogue, and Jamie shapes business decisions with me. There's a lot of crossover. My strength is the overview, the way things fit together, and Jamie's is detail and [a little snicker of amusement] rigorous perfection.'

According to his wife, Jamie is 'self-taught. He basically said: "How does it work, knitwear?" He got some patterns and worked out, with a calculator, how to design a knitting pattern, the stitching...' Equally, Jessica had never seen a spreadsheet. But somehow their expensive handmade knits, very fine intarsia, were a success. Browns, Liberty, Saks, Bergdorf Goodman and Lucille Lewin's Whistles snapped them up and, for the next two decades, sold them at £400 a pop. Unsurprisingly, it was a limited market.

As they approached 40, with two teenage children, the couple grew bored with the restrictions of knitwear, irritated by the profits being skimmed off by the big stores, wishing they could do something that had a broader appeal. 'So the idea we came up with was pyjamas and gowns,' says Jamie. 'Easy clothes in natural materials for kicking around in at home, at good prices.' They chose the name because it conjured up the spirit of long, lazy weekend breakfasts.

This was a good time to launch a mail-order business. Thanks to pioneering work done by Boden, The White Company and Racing Green, the market was open to possibilities other than the high street, and after a few snippets in the press, the first catalogue, a fold-out leaflet full of unisex slubby-silk gowns and waffle pyjamas, flew out of the Seatons' spare bedroom. This was the epoch of the shell suit, and Toast's alternative was thrillingly short on fluorescent polyester: a thousand people bought from the first collection (lots of vicars, for some reason, and the Washington Post 's war correspondent rang from Bosnia to order some PJs to be shipped to the States). Next time around, they introduced drawstring wideleg trousers, little shift dresses. Jamie is quite frank about the fact that nothing fitted very well: he was learning as he went along. Who were they targeting? They weren't very sure. 'We didn't analyse what customer we wanted,' he says. 'It was pretty intuitive or instinctive.'

'It's non-fashion fashion,' says Jessica. 'The clothes that we've become known for making make you feel good, a bit special, but they don't wear you, and they're comfortable - and that combination is quite hard to find.'

Alongside the clothes, they sold carefully sourced linen towels, Irish bedlinen, pillows filled with millet or spelt. People who never knew that millet pillows existed suddenly found they couldn't sleep until they'd ordered one or two. However, over time, as the clothes collection grew, the homewares were squeezed out of the catalogue. Now the Seatons feel it's time to put that right.

The brand has grown steadily; seven years ago French Connection invested heavily, though the Seatons say they're left pretty much to their own devices. The only collection which flopped was Spring/Summer 07, full of Western-cut jackets and cropped trousers, which left me - and everyone else - pease-pudding cold. Jamie is keen to let me know he wasn't mad about it either; he didn't edit the clothes sufficiently tightly and lost control of the catalogue styling. 'Each collection has a story and perhaps the idea of the story - American, Forties, rural, dustbowlish - was a bit austere.' But good news: the new range (which has, according to Jessica, 'a bit of a Jane Birkin feeling') is treat-heavy.

Jamie takes me to a sampling meeting. Tacked up on the wall are magazine spreads and postcards being used as reference points for S/S 08: pictures of funfairs, lidos, vintage ads from Morecambe and Butlins, snaps of buckets and spades. As he and assistant clothing designers Tamsin and Saffron debate the merits of a soft-brown skirt dimly printed with large pink roses, wondering whether the pale string belt would look better if tea-stained, I feel the madness gripping me again. I want to wear that skirt, and while I wear it I want to clean the white-painted floorboards of my beach hut with one of those £45 long-handled beech brushes, and then I want to sit out on the porch wrapped in a £195 Welsh tapestry blanket while having a (hand-pressed, irregularly glazed earthenware) cup of tea.

'You buy Ralph Lauren and imagine you're the Great Gatsby,' says Jamie. 'Toast is, I suppose, a lifestyle brand, but it's saying: you don't have to do anything. This lifestyle is about just taking a walk or stopping and reading a book. The 21st century is stressful and full of noise, but it doesn't have to be like that: take a breather.' As he knows, it doesn't get more halcyon, or more lucrative, than that.

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