Hello, and welcome to Fairy Valley
I'm Fabienne: author, illustrator, and the person behind every fairy, flower, and teapot house you'll find here.
Before Fairy Valley, I spent sixteen years building a career in finance and design, working my way up to VP level. It was a world of spreadsheets and strategy decks, useful, as it turns out, but a long way from the hedgerows and folklore I'd loved since I was small. Eventually I left it behind to do something I'd wanted to do since I was a teenager dreaming of becoming a mangaka: make art and stories, full time.
I trained formally at a competitive art foundation programme in Switzerland, and that grounding, alongside a lifelong love of Brambly Hedge, Studio Ghibli, Flower Fairies, Art Nouveau, and Pre-Raphaelite painting, shapes everything I make. I work mostly in digital illustration these days, but I'm always drawn back to traditional materials: dip pen, watercolour, gold foil, the kind of textures that feel handmade, because they are.
There's a strong thread of Japan running through my work too, alongside a very English sensibility: hedgerows, National Trust gardens, the turning of the seasons. Fairy Valley lives somewhere in the overlap of those two worlds.
I'm based just outside London, near Epping Forest, where I write, paint, and illustrate every corner of this world myself, from the stories to the finished prints you'll find in the shop.
If you look closely, you'll spot two familiar faces throughout my illustrations: Mimi and Mom. They turn up again and again in this world, woven into the details of almost everything I make.
