Creating a Storm

Sarah is the founder of one of the world's best known model agencies, Storm, and discovered one of the best known models on the planet, Kate Moss, as well as a string of other catwalk stars including Sophie Dahl.

And 21 years after founding her company she is still at the top of her game.

The glamorous sphere of high fashion could hardly be further away from the sleepy village near Lyndhurst where Sarah spent much of her childhood.

But what may come as a real surprise to many is not that Sarah came from this world but that she is still very much a part of it.

She now owns the beautifully restored cottage that was once her grandmother's and lives between there and London, returning with her family every Friday night to potter round her garden, look after her animals and return to the comforts and occasional tribulations of village life.

It would be easy to think that someone who has managed to carve out such a successful career in an incredibly competitive and changeable industry would be difficult to deal with - perhaps stand-offish, arrogant, or interrupting the interview to take important business calls.

But the mother-of-three couldn't be further from this stereotype.

She is laidback and welcoming, asking the photographer and I if we want some food as soon as we arrive, seeming completely unconcerned about how long the interview and photos take and asking questions about our families, journeys, etc.

There are interruptions to the interview but they are because she leaps up to show me her grandfather's old livestock brand which she is hoping to use again - she is a New Forest Commoner and has the right to graze the cattle she's planning on getting on the land - or because her youngest daughter, Poppy, and friends pile into the large kitchen where we are chatting and she wants to shoo them off.

Still strikingly pretty it comes as no surprise to hear that Sarah, 49, was once a model herself.

It was never a serious career - for one thing at just five foot three her opportunities were limited and she didn't particularly enjoy it.

It was a job she fell into having horrified her father, a doctor, by walking out of school before sitting her A-levels and seeing what else the world had to offer.

"My father was very driven and he felt that the only way to excel was academically. I was one of those people who, the more I got pushed, the more I resented it. So I think just out of devilishness I walked out in the middle of my A-levels. I just wasn't interested, which is awful. I regret it - you have to make up for it later," she says.

Make up for it she certainly did. She started out selling clothes in London's Kensington market, which was where someone suggested she try her hand at modelling.

"It was a good way of making money," she says.

"I wasn't that interested in it but it enabled me to do what I wanted to do."

And what she wanted to do was run an antique stall, first in London and then in Paris before moving to San Francisco with her first husband, where she had her first child, Noelle, and branched into making children's hats.

It was after her family moved back to London that she moved into model management. A photographer friend told her that model agency Laraine Ashton IMG were looking for a booker and suggested she applied.

"I always wanted to work for myself.

I probably got my independence from my grandmother," says Sarah.

"I'd never worked for anybody in my life so I thought it would last about six months but I really loved it and I stayed about six years!" she laughs.

"Eventually though I became frustrated. I'd become head booker so there wasn't anywhere else for me to go and I was really ambitious."

Sarah decided that she would leave and set up her own company but she didn't feel comfortable keeping secrets.

She told Laraine that she was intending to leave and didn't make any attempt to take any of the models she managed with her to her new agency.

"There was quite a lot to be done when you've just left a job that was well paid and you've got a mortgage,"

she says, characteristically underplaying her achievement.

Luckily Sarah knew entrepreneur Richard Branson. He went into partnership with her and also gave her a large loan to get her company off the ground. But nevertheless, it was still very hard work.

Because she hadn't taken any of her old models with her she was forced to literally go out on the street to find girls. But looking back she thinks that this may have worked to her advantage, as it meant that she was bringing fresh blood into the industry and still recruits girls in this way today.

"The first girl I found was at a CND rally and she had technicolor hair. Then I found a girl outside a garage in Battersea and another girl in Pizza Express on the King's Road. It was mad. I was just looking everywhere and anywhere. I found about seven girls in the street which was quite a high batting average."

Of course, one of the girls she famously discovered was a 14-year-old Kate Moss, who was waiting at the same Pan Am check-in desk in America.

"I just saw her face," she remembers of the celebrity model who has referred to Sarah as her second mother.

"If you know what you're doing, you can tell. I thought she had fantastic bone structure. You're more likely to be right about someone if you see them in their natural state."

Sarah's affection for Moss is tangible.

She chats about her coming over for dinner and her kitchen is decorated with a large and striking photo of the model whose career has become so tightly bound with her own.

That said, it's clear that Sarah is close to and protective of all her models. She talks about how she encourages all her girls to stay in education until they are at least 18 and is supportive of them going on to do degrees. She also says how pleased she is that girls now have to be 16 years old to go on a catwalk and how important it is to look after them in general.

She also feels very strongly about unscrupulous people who exploit young people's dreams of becoming a model to abuse or extract money from them and thinks that people should be sceptical when they are approached by someone who says they are a scout.

One of Sarah's friends, Paul, a model at Storm pulls up a chair at the kitchen table and joins in the interview.

"Storm is like a big family," he says.

"We all go out together on a Friday night and even go on holiday with each other."

Sarah's life seems very glamorous and it's easy to assume that it's filled with parties and socialising with A-list celebrities but, she says, that just doesn't interest her.

The New Forest will always be where her heart is and she's far too eager to get back here at the weekend to spend her time partying.

"I don't go to all the parties that I'm invited to," she says.

"I'd much rather go to dinner with friends or stay home with my family cooking and having a nice glass of wine."

At a glance it could seem that Sarah Doukas' life is a million miles away from where she grew up, on a New Forest farm.

But on closer inspection, while she has travelled the world, dabbled in a variety of careers and established a top international model agency, her heart has always stayed in the same place.

She may be a glamorous high flyer, but at heart, she's still the New Forest girl who loves looking after animals, pottering round in her garden and is far more interested in the threatened closure of the local post office than the latest Gucci collection.

SARAH DOUKAS IS ALWAYS interested in recruiting new models. If you think you might have what it takes, send a close up and full length photo of yourself to her at Storm. Do not pay to get photos takes especially - Sarah says that holiday snaps are ideal. She is looking to recruit women aged 14 to 22 and men aged up to 30. For more information, visit stormmodels.com.