Spring Collection
Alongside the collaboration with Charlotte Johnstone, Soane is also adding several new designs to its own fabric collections. For the first time it is an English archival design that has inspired a Soane floral chintz, rather than a hand-drawn document painted in India’s Coromandel Coast, and ‘Roses’ does feel entirely English, drawing inspiration from a late 18th-century glazed cotton, spilling over with blousy flowers associated with an English herbaceous border. The timeless ‘Reynolds Stripe’ weave, meanwhile, recalls a more elegantly austere form of 18th-century design. These patterns join the romantically diaphanous ‘Papyrus’ weave, the perfect neutral fabric for lightening up a room, along with new versions of much-loved favourites: Sophie Coryndon’s ‘Wilton Vine’ now on a linen base and fresh new green colourways for ‘Scrolling Acanthus’ and ‘Corded Stripe.’
New rattan designs include mirrors, seating, tables and bookcases. The Rattan Walpole Mirror is influenced by the distinctive silhouettes in Horace Walpole’s house at Strawberry Hill, with its pointed arch speaking to the villa’s “Strawberry Hill Gothic” style. The ‘Rattan Neith Tables’ are configured to work as dining, centre and side tables. Re-worked in rattan, their form is loosely inspired by the Arts & Crafts movement’s spiderweb silhouettes. As with all Soane’s rattan designs they are made at its own Leicestershire workshop. A pair of favourite side tables, the ‘Rattan Osiris Side Table’ and the ‘Dryad Rattan Leighton Table’, now have lower incarnations, particularly useful in front of sofas, and the ‘Rattan Hurlingham Column Bookcase’ also takes on a new more compact form, with a single column of shelves. The ‘Rattan Upholstered Venus Stool’, on the other hand, gains height with a new countertop edition.
The ‘Double Rise and Fall Ceiling Light’ is joined by the lighter ‘Single Rise and Fall’, which is supremely practical, requiring only a light touch to adjust the shade height. Engineered by craftsmen on England’s South Coast, the brass dome detail is precisely counterweighted, depending on whether a rattan, vellum, card or gathered shade is selected.
