An Interior Designer’s Travel-Inspired Textiles
By Camille Sojit Pejcha
The New York Times
For 15 years, the Los Angeles-based interior designer Sean Leffers has been collecting vintage fabrics he encountered on his travels. “My favorite pieces are the ones that clearly show creation across hundreds of years, where you can see the lineage,” he says. But when redesigning restaurants and interiors, he struggled to source vintage textiles of the length and strength required — so he began making them himself. He created his inaugural fabric collections — which include prints made using blocks hand-carved in Delhi and ahimsa silk created in Rajasthan — in collaboration with artisans around the world.
“It’s about making things that feel connected to our human history of craftsmanship, while also being practical.”
Inspired by designs from Japan’s Edo period, Leffers’s new Between Heaven and Earth collection features woven checks, katazome florals (made using the Japanese stencil dyeing technique), and patterns of peonies and chrysanthemums. A second set of fabrics, In the Shadow of Merapi, is named after the mountain that looms over Java, and pays tribute to the history of Indonesian textiles via techniques like warp printing and dobby weaving. “It’s about making things that feel connected to our human history of craftsmanship, while also being practical,” says Leffers.
