Bold, beautiful prints from House of Hackney

How House of Hackney got us living loud

HOUSE OF HACKNEY started eight years ago, around the kitchen table of a Victorian house in east London. Founders Frieda Gormley and Javvy M Royle had recently moved into their home, and found its bland decor uninspiring. ‘It had white walls and Swedish furniture, and we both really wanted to use textures and print,’ says Gormley.

‘We couldn’t find anything that spoke to us: wallpapers and fabrics were either very classical at the top end, or very disposable and high street at the lower end. We decided to create what we were looking for.’

The couple, who previously worked in the fashion industry, had met four years earlier at a party in Hackney. The buzzy east London borough is everpresent in their aesthetic: ‘It’s the beating heart of the brand; we’re inspired by the mood of the place,’ she says.

After spending six months touring the country in a van to find suppliers and manufacturers, they started their homeware business with three print designs, which captured the look of traditional British patterns but with a subversive twist. Their nostalgic yet edgy creations have stormed the interiors world, spearheading the trend for maximalism, which has seen the return of heavily printed walls and furnishings.

Nature and the environment are always the starting points for a new pattern, explains Gormley. For their latest collection, Dinosauria, the couple imagined an idyllic scene ‘of a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and there was no interference from humans’ – their central character being a very 2019 dinosaur, Iggy the vegan Iguanodon.

To make the print, the couple began by selecting colours – a palette of turmeric yellow, plaster pink and dusky grey. ‘Our antennae are always on,’ says Gormley. ‘It’s very unexpected, where inspiration comes from – I’ll run down the street after an old lady wearing an amazing-coloured coat.’ Next, they sketched out motifs on paper and also used the ipad app Procreate.

To make their design sophisticated rather than childish, the couple set their dinosaurs within a toile de Jouy background – a classical 18th-century scenic pattern – and worked with a specialist artist to create this effect. Finally, their in-house print designer made tweaks and it was sent to fabric and wallpaper printers, who produce ‘strike offs’, or samples, which were fine-tuned before production.

The Dinosauria collection, which launched this month, includes fabrics and wallpapers, lampshades, cushions, a ceramic lamp base and bookends. ‘For us,’ says Gormley, ‘it was about creating the most beautiful dinosaur, that we, as big kids, would really love to have.’ houseofhackney.com