British upholstery house Planted has collaborated with hand screen-printing studio Sgrinhouse to create Alice, a chair in which the fabric is not simply a covering but a defining element of the furniture's design.
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| Planted, the British upholstery house built on old skills, has launched the Alice chair made in collaboration with hand screen-printing studio Sgrinhouse. |
The collaboration brings together two complementary craft disciplines — traditional upholstery and hand screen printing — resulting in a piece that demonstrates how textile creativity can influence furniture form as well as surface.
Named after Sgrinhouse founder Alice Smith*, the Alice chair is upholstered entirely in Sgrinhouse's hand screen-printed Stripes design, including its legs. Printed in a rich rust colourway, the pattern creates an uninterrupted visual surface around the chair, emphasising its sculptural silhouette while retaining the irregularity and character associated with a handmade textile.
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| The Alice chair - named after Sgrinhouse founder Alice Smith - is upholstered entirely in the studio’s hand screen-printed “Stripes” design. |
Planted, the British upholstery house built on old skills, has launched Alice — a new chair made in collaboration with hand screen-printing studio Sgrinhouse.
For Planted co-founder Daisy, it was the quality of the fabric that provided the starting point for the collaboration. She first encountered Sgrinhouse at Chelsea Harbour in London during its Focus on Design event and immediately recognised a shared approach to craftsmanship.
“The fabric was clearly hand-printed — you could see straight away the difference that quality makes,” she says. “We recognised the same standard in each other’s work immediately.”
Fabric as a starting point for furniture design
The partnership developed as Planted was working on a contemporary, armless bedroom chair. Rather than beginning with a fully resolved furniture form and subsequently selecting a fabric, the company allowed the textile to influence the design itself.
“The fabric gave us the answer,” says Daisy. “Simple from the front, with a hidden detail in the side shape — the print shaped the proportions, right down to covering the legs.”
This approach places the textile at the heart of the design process. The scale, rhythm and repeat of the Stripes pattern become part of the chair's architecture, rather than functioning as a decorative layer applied once the furniture has been designed.
For the upholstery market, it is an interesting distinction. Patterned fabrics are traditionally selected to complement a furniture shape; in Alice, the relationship is more integrated, with the printed textile helping determine how the furniture is conceived and ultimately experienced.
Developing a fabric for upholstery
The collaboration also required Sgrinhouse to adapt its textile practice to the technical requirements of furniture.
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| Both studios trace the collaboration to a shared belief in traditional skill, applied with a modern eye. See Alice chair being hand-built, from screen-printed cloth to finished chair on the Planted x Sgrinhouse collaboration page. Click HERE. |
The studio developed a new heavyweight fabric specifically for upholstery, while adapting the positioning of the pattern pieces to minimise waste as the chair took shape. The result is a closer relationship between textile development, cutting and upholstery than would normally be possible when working from an existing roll of furnishing fabric.
Sgrinhouse describes its approach as bringing “craft and modernity together” to create durable, timeless textiles, with designs developed and hand printed in-house.
The Stripes pattern draws on the work of artists including Anni Albers and Agnes Martin, while its rust colourway reflects the maritime landscape that informs the wider collection. In the finished chair, the graphic simplicity of the stripe provides a strong contrast with the tactile construction beneath it.
Sgrinhouse founder Alice Smith was recently recognised by Homes & Gardens as its “Best Newcomer in Fabric”, underlining the growing profile of a new generation of British textile designers working across traditional printing techniques and contemporary interiors.
Traditional upholstery meets made-to-order production
Every Alice chair is hand-built to order in Planted's Cotswolds workshop. Rather than producing furniture for stock, the company makes each piece only after an order has been placed.
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| Every Alice chair is hand-built to order in Planted’s Cotswolds workshop. |
The construction reflects Planted's emphasis on traditional upholstery and natural materials. Each chair uses a solid FSC-certified beech frame, hand-tied springs and a natural filling incorporating latex, wool and coco fibre. Polyurethane foam and chemical treatments are excluded.
The upholstery is built from the frame upwards, with each upholsterer signing the finished piece.
“Each upholsterer builds a piece from the frame up, and signs their name to it,” says Daisy. “That’s the accountability we build every piece on.”
The approach also makes the chair suitable for future reupholstery. Rather than treating the finished product as disposable, Planted designs Alice to be recovered and passed on.
There is, inevitably, a trade-off. Producing a bespoke chair around a hand-printed fabric is slower and more costly than purchasing an existing stock fabric and manufacturing furniture to a standard production specification. But it also gives the designer considerably greater control over the relationship between textile, construction and finished form.
In this case, the amount of fabric required is determined by the chair itself, rather than the chair being designed around an existing industrial production system.
A wider British craft movement
The Planted/Sgrinhouse collaboration sits within a broader UK interiors landscape in which hand-printed textiles and traditional upholstery are being brought together to create highly individual furniture.
Pukka Print Linen, for example, has collaborated with British furniture maker Boura & White, whose sofas, armchairs and footstools are crafted in the UK. The partnership places Pukka Print's hand block-printed linens and woven fabrics directly onto the furniture, demonstrating how a strongly crafted textile can alter the character and visual language of an upholstered form.
Another example is Bonfield Block Printers, whose West Dorset workshop produces furniture upholstered in its own hand block-printed linens. The company combines the printed textiles with traditional upholstery techniques and natural materials such as horsehair and calico, producing highly individual pieces rather than standardised furniture.
At a larger design-house level, Soane Britain similarly brings furniture, upholstery and textile design together. Its fabrics are produced in British mills and workshops using traditional techniques including block and screen printing, while its custom service allows designers to commission fabrics for specific projects.
The UK also retains a small but significant network of specialist textile printers. Rapture & Wright, for instance, is among the British studios continuing to use hand-printing techniques for interior textiles, while Thorp of London produces hand screen-printed fabrics in small batches from its Norfolk workshop, alongside woven jacquards produced in Suffolk.
For designers and specifiers, such practices offer something increasingly valuable: textiles with a visible relationship to the hand, rather than anonymous surfaces produced solely for volume manufacture.
For Planted and Sgrinhouse, the significance of Alice ultimately lies in the connection between the two disciplines.
For an industry increasingly interested in provenance, materiality and the value of skilled making, Alice illustrates another important proposition: when textile design and furniture design begin with each other rather than operating separately, the fabric can become the architecture of the product.
* Sgrinhouse founder Alice Smith was named “Best Newcomer in Fabric” by Homes & Gardens in 2025 for her textile design work.
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