Heritage Brands, Autumn Colours and Botanicals

18 July 2019
Both the sustainability and Bauhaus trend which we have been enjoying this year dovetail perfectly into the exciting relaunch of heritage brands. Furniture designer Alys Bryan takes a closer look at these brands, as well as how Soft Green is expanding the Warm Autumn colour palette and how botanical designs have grown in to an interior trend. www.alysbryan.co.uk

Heritage Brands

Ernest Race's first chair, the BA3, was exhibited at the 1946 Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition ‘Britain Can Make It’ where Race demonstrated new manufacturing techniques utilising salvaged aircraft parts. Several of Race's designs can be confidently chalked down as design classics and there has long been a thriving vintage market for his furniture. This Spring welcomed the relaunch of heritage brand Race Furniture alongside a collaboration with upholsterer and daytime television presenter Jay Blades. A perfect pairing with Blades creating a selection of Race pieces punctuated with his own colourful design flourishes.

Race Furniture has not been the only heritage brand to relaunch this Spring and it was a pleasure to see John & Sylvia Reid's S-Range furniture, originally manufactured by Stag, relaunched at Clerkwenwell Design Week. Dominic Reid, John and Sylvia Reid's son, has joined forces with Nicholas Radford, a prominent member of Stag's management team until it closed in 1992, to relaunch the brand. The duo have refined the production of the Reid's original 1960s' designs and introduced heritage designs perfect for the contemporary home, workplace and hotel.

It is joy to see Ernest Race and John & Sylvia Reid's designs available fresh from the factory and I do hope that now is the time for heritage brands to thrive.

Heritage designs have endured the test of time because of the designer's attention to detail and bravery to design for the next generation. When incorporating this trend in to your interior scheme, it is important to seek advice on mouldings which best suit your artwork in order to create a framed piece which will not date. Consider timeless natural timber mouldings such as LJC Barefaced Oak Moulding 113200000 or LJC Barefaced Obeche Moulding 169400000. Select a neutral mount and pay attention to the texture, a perfect choice would be from the Linen Collection.

Soft Green

A Warm Autumn colour palette has grown in strength after Living Coral was announced as Pantone's Colour of the Year 2019. These warm tones have been used widely over the last six months and have now been joined by a complementary soft green. Soft Green calms the reds of Warm Autumn, freshening and energising the colour palette.

Incorporating Soft Green within your framing choice is the perfect way to balance it into a harmonised scheme. The Confetti collection offers several colour and scale options, for example LJS Confetti II Moulding 140642 and LJS Confetti II Moulding 140646. Alternatively for a moulding with more depth of colour try LJS Komodo II Moulding 241270. Mountboard can be extremely subtle, such as the LJC MB Cons Dawn Green 1400, or have a more intense colour ranging from LJC MB Cons Salisbury Green 1400 to LJC MB Cons Lentil 1400 FSC.
Botanical

The botanical trend has somewhat snuck up on me, despite lusting after one of illustrator Brie Harrison's botanical prints for some time, but now botanical designs have become a key interior element.
Visitors to this year's RHS Chelsea Flower Show could not have helped but have been inspired by the elegant floral displays as well as the superbly designed feature gardens. Butter Wakefield’s beautiful table dressings of peonies, poppies and foxgloves - in Ross Alan’s garden designed for Gaze Burvill - perfectly encapsulated how floral beauty can be used both inside and out.
Also at RHS Chelsea Flower Show was textiles designer Laura Slater who took a less pictorial approach and created stunning textile panels as part of her collaboration with botanical design studio The Plant Room, to design an engaging space with the themes of nature, creativity and wellbeing.

The botanical trend is the perfect opportunity for you to display a gallery of beautifully coordinated pieces of artwork. Choose an elegant frame, such as LJS Original Collection Chantilly 979612 or LJC Barefaced Oak Moulding 135200000, and frame your artwork in identically sized frames to hang as a geometric grid or in a selection of sizes to create an eclectic gallery. Select your mount colour to suit your botanical artwork, or botanical wallpaper, but don't shy away from coloured mounts such as LJC MB Cons Gable Green 1400 FSC or LJC MB Cons Primrose 1400 FSC.
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