Fabrics

The library is deliberately small. Sixteen cloths is enough to cover any room in the country and few enough that we can hold every one of them on the rack, test every batch, and tell you honestly which ones we would not put in a house with a labrador in it.

What the numbers mean

Martindale is an abrasion count. A disc of worsted wool is rubbed against the cloth in a figure of eight until two threads break. Twenty thousand rubs is fine for a guest bedroom; forty thousand is a family sitting room; a hundred thousand is a waiting room in a railway station. Above about fifty thousand the number stops meaning much for domestic use.

Stain grade runs one to five and is ours, not the mill’s. We put red wine, olive oil and ballpoint on a panel of every batch, leave it thirty minutes, and clean it the way a customer would. Grade five comes out completely. Grade two keeps a shadow.

Colour fastness is the blue wool scale, one to eight, measuring how far a cloth shifts under sustained daylight. Four is acceptable away from a window. Seven means solution-dyed, where the pigment is locked into the fibre before it is ever spun.

The four tiers

Tier one is our own cottons and linens, held in stock, no uplift. Tier two adds fourteen per cent and covers the mill-woven wools, velvets and chenilles. Tier three is twenty-six per cent for solution-dyed performance cloth woven to order. Tier four is forty-five per cent for full-grain aniline hides, which we buy one at a time.

The uplift is a percentage of the piece, not a flat fee, because a corner sofa takes four times the yardage of an armchair and it would be dishonest to charge them the same.