This day has been a long time in the making. I didn’t just suddenly wake up one morning and decide to open my own studio, it took years of study, thousands of hours clocked up in hands on experience, commuting and working long days freelance for other designers, running another studio and overcoming many, many hurdles to get to this point. Back when I was a student at KLC I figured it would be about 10 years before I was ready to go it alone and open my own studio, but circumstances aligned and the time felt right to go for it and jump in with both feet (or burn the f**king boats, if you’re familiar with Tony Robbins..)
So here we are, now in a little office on the first floor of a lovely period building just off the high street in Marlborough. Although I’ve been working in the industry for years and know most of the reps and fabric houses, it’s basically like starting from scratch again. At my home studio I didn’t have the space to store lots of samples so just used to order the odd one when I needed them, but here I spent pretty much the entire first 2 weeks emailing the reps to open my own trade accounts, filling in forms, booking meetings and ordering lots of samples to stock my fabric and materials library.
As a designer who is specifying the use of lots of fabrics and surface materials of all compositions, from marble to carpet and wood, I feel it’s part of our job description and responsibility to be sustainably minded when sourcing. There are so many millions of products on the market now that it’s not as tricky as it used to be to find so called ‘green’ or ‘eco-friendly’ products. We make hundreds of choices a month of which fabrics to use and I made the conscious decision right from the start of opening the new studio that we would only stock natural and sustainable textiles and materials in our library, so there’s no possibility of some synthetic non-biodegradable fabric making its way into one of our schemes just because it’s sitting on the shelf and we think it’s pretty.
In our schemes you’ll notice lots of linens, organic cottons, 100% cotton velvets, wool, wood, bamboo, cork, metal, stone and bespoke artisan products such as handmade clay tiles and bamboo silk rugs. We love earthy tones, texture and pattern, as well as an uncluttered and non-fussy look. We source one off bespoke pieces from craftsmen and women and mix these up with antiques and some designer and responsibly manufactured high street finds. If that’s your bag, then come and check us out, we’d love to meet you!
Jenny Quinlan
Director & Head of Design
Studio JQ Ltd
@thestudiojq