Showroom

John Robshaw Textiles

By appointment

Trade account to buy

Block printed and hand stitched textiles, bedding, and upholstery drawn from India and Southeast Asia.

John Robshaw Textiles works in hand block printing, and the New York address at 245 West 29th Street is a trade showroom on the twelfth floor rather than a shop. The fabric and wallpaper side sells to the trade through design showrooms, and the showroom is seen by appointment.

Block printing is what the house is for and it decides everything else. A carved wooden block is inked and struck onto the cloth by hand, once per colour, so a repeat is laid by a person and carries the evidence of it. Registration drifts by a hair, colour density varies across a length, and the edge of a motif is softer than a screen print gives. Those are the qualities being bought, and a client expecting the evenness of a machine print will read them as faults unless the difference is shown first.

Beyond fabric and wallpaper the house carries bedding, quilts and shams, pillows in block printed, embroidered, hand painted and woven versions, plus rugs, tapestries, lamps and furniture. The retail shop is in Falls Village, Connecticut, and is a different errand from the New York trade floor.

The showroom is by appointment, the trade programme sits behind registration, and the fabric line runs through a separate contact from the retail side.

Order the yardage in one go. On a hand printed cloth a second cutting from a later print run will not match the first the way a machine print would, so a scheme that may need a spare chair covered later wants that yardage bought now and stored, rather than reordered against a dye lot that has moved.