A Splendid Night

Family luxury bedding brand Bella Notte grows from garage business

By Hollie Deese

Taylor Batlin was used to her fashion designer mom Kathleen McCoy experimenting with rolls of fabrics, silks and linens and really anything luxe, in her career with Jessica McClintock back in the ’90s. McCoy began her own jacket line, but when she began taking those same fabrics and trying them out on home textiles and bedding, something clicked.

“She had all this linen to make jackets, but her buyers were really interested in choosing polar fleece,” Batlin says. “So she had a bunch of linen lying around, and she decided to make up some bedding. My brother and I were young at the time and she wanted beautiful, elegant, luxurious bedding, but that could still be washed at home.”

So in Bella Notte’s garage-turned-design-studio, McCoy made bedding from that luxe linen, but she also had a bit of silk and velvet she wanted to incorporate. Unfortunately, the colors were off. So McCoy found a local small-batch dyer to help her achieve a uniform look among the disparate fabrics without sacrificing comfort or adding chemicals.

“I think probably back then she found him in the Yellow Pages,” Batlin says. “He is just a very creative person, as well, and she was really interested in being able to create this bedding, from garment to dyeing. It’s a huge art, and I think they were kindred spirits in wanting to make something fresh and new.”

Still working with that same dyer, they custom-dye small batches of product to order, and an in-house textile designer creates all their prints. Bella Notte’s core fabrics are silk, velvet, linen, silk charmeuse, cotton velvet and tencel, which is a sustainable fiber made from wood pulp. The line is available locally at The Iron Gate.

As a child, Batlin loved helping her mom and always knew she wanted to join Bella Notte after college.

“I would start going to market with her when I was really young,” she says. “I don’t know how much of a salesperson I was, but I loved going with her and helping to put the beds together and dress the beds and talk to anyone that would come up about the attributes of Bella.”

Batlin joined the company in 2008 after graduating, and she became a partner in 2018. She is excited to lead the company into the future, always striving for more sustainability and ethical practices, with the same grit she remembers her mom having in the garage when she was 11.

And she feels more lucky than ever before, now that home and family have taken on an especially poignant meaning this year.

“It’s really great to work together,” Batlin says. “Obviously we just trust each other so much, and each other’s aesthetic. We’re really lucky because we’re really similar but we also have different strengths, and so it’s just a cohesive relationship. It’s wonderful.”