If, like me, you are a textile lover and keen to do your bit for the environment, instead of buying new, try looking into the world of repurposed textiles and you’ll find an increasing range of fabrics available from luxury brands that will give a high-end look at home and cost you far less than you might expect. At Haines we’re working with names such as Pierre Frey, Fermoie, Chrisophe Farr and Romo - to name just a few - re-homing surplus fabrics and passing on the cost savings to the customer. Some fabrics might be limited, slightly defective or previous season - but if you don’t mind that and enjoy getting hands-on with your own upholstery, you can create some really luxurious designs for the home on a budget.
I recently completed two bedroom projects at home both using repurposed luxury fabrics, coming in at a fraction of the cost of using newly bought textiles - and there were no printing lead-times involved either. Here are my top tips for starting on your own project at home and how to re-create some of the looks.
Identify your look
To achieve a cohesive, luxurious look in both rooms I started by first identifying a vibe that I wanted to centre each around, putting together inspiration via Pinterest and creating a board for each room. Using repurposed textiles - like using vintage furniture - you can't be too set on patterns until you start sourcing, but if you have a sense of a look and colours that appeal to you it helps you start refining your ideas. For the master bedroom I wanted luxurious, regal inspired calm, and for the children’s bedroom, something fun and creative that could easily be updated as their tastes develop. With not a huge amount of space available, I began looking at half-testers for the master bedroom which would make use of the height of the room and also bring in a sense of a boutique hotel-esque bedroom. For the children’s room, my kids have always liked the idea of a ‘big top’ and so I thought it could be fun to create drapes behind each bed that would create this tent vibe. This also makes the beds feel cocooned in a way as the ceiling heights are quite tall in these rooms, so makes the rooms feel cosier.
Try your hand at DIY
Once you have a clear idea of your aesthetic, YouTube and Instagram are great platforms when looking for advice and tips of how others have created DIY projects at home. I’m quite hands-on and like DIY as I find that putting in some effort and doing it yourself not only saves you money, but also gives you a great sense of accomplishment. For the master bedroom project, I broke down the elements needed to make a half tester, drawing out each piece to create an exploded view diagram. I viewed bed canopies online and watched videos online to figure it out, and took lots of pictures of any that I came across in person. I was recommended to buy the book ‘The Encyclopedia of Curtains’, which I discovered on eBay. This was very helpful when it came to making the back and side curtains. It also gave advice on how to make the frame. If however, you’re not keen on the DIY side of things, the good thing to remember is that as you’re using cheaper repurposed fabrics, you can always invest that money towards getting some professional help if you need.
Sourcing repurposed fabrics
When sourcing repurposed textiles you have to be quite decisive! You can find luxury second-hand fabrics with around 50% off the original RRP but, like shopping for vintage, there are normally limited quantities available. But that also means that unlike shopping for new fabrics, you can’t take a lot of time dwelling on a fabric as more than often these are snapped up pretty quickly. Once you’ve finalised your aesthetic and calculated the amount of fabric you’ll need for your project, you should try and narrow down a colour palette for the scheme and search for fabrics that contain predominantly those tones. This ensures an edited look that keeps the room looking sophisticated rather than too much of a riot of colour. I’ll always try to stick to a colour palette of three colours maximum, but within that I’ll mix different patterns and styles as the colours tie everything together.
Achieving a cohesive look: the master bedroom
For the master bedroom, the tone was set courtesy of the antique wooden frontal that I had discovered from The French Room. Its dark blue base, white surround and dark red accents helped me set a direction of the colour palette I wanted to go in and keep me on track. With this in mind I discovered a large meterage of fabric from Christopher Farr via Haines that I loved for its dark navy and white pattern. I worked directly with Naturalmat to upholster the bed frame and headboard in this, and finished with a dark orange velvet trim. Naturalmat then returned the remaining velvet fabric to me so I could then reuse it as part of the half-tester design. For the curtains, I selected fabrics from Pukka Print with its mix of blue, white and red that reflected the frontal, and finished with a plain blue fabric remnant from Linwood for the backdrop. Keeping within this tight colour palette really sets this luxury tone in this room and shows that it has been curated and thought about. For a final luxury finish too, we fitted simple socket wall lights to the wall and used the fabric to cover the wires.
Achieving elegance in the children's room
For the children’s room we took creative direction from the kids’ based around the central circus top lighting fixture we’d made a few years ago. Taking the stripes from this as inspiration, we used screw-in hooks and batons to create a fabric drop that runs from above the bed all the way behind the bed frames up to the ceiling. This creates a really cosy but chic effect and the Blithfield fabric remnant we used from Haines was perfect for the circus stripe. What I love about this most is that we can simply change up the fabrics as and when we want for different looks. With that in mind I also sourced beds from The Original Bed Company with panel headboards and footboards which can be upholstered in any fabric you like, again meaning you can update as and when without having to buy a whole new bed. Here we used a fabric from the brilliant Sophia Francis with light red elements in the pattern to continue the red from the circus stripes, and which also introduces shades of blue and turquoise. The finishing touch here are the upcycled quilts made by Georgia Bosson who works with remnants of fabrics to create beautiful patterns, and here ties the scheme together beautifully using blue, turquoise and soft reds.
For more DIY and fabric ideas from Jules Haines you can visit her Instagram here
