Eureka 430: Why materials matter

0:15You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Frank Roop is an interior designer and the founder of the Textilium Project, a direct-to-consumer platform making high-end, 100 % natural textiles accessible to design-conscious individuals. After years of curating textile schemes for private clients, he saw a gap in the market. How do people without a designer find and combine the best materials for their homes? This led to Textilium, which simplifies the process by transforming exclusive trade-only fabrics into ready-to-use design schemes, removing the guesswork from selecting colours, textures and finishes.

1:01So, how do you take these once-exclusive textiles and bring them to a new audience of creative? Well, here's Frank with more on how the journey began.

1:16so the textilium project was something i thought about many years ago when i was working with a client in my interior design business and the client mentioned how do you come up with all these textile schemes you know specifically for my home because i was describing the trick of finding all these materials and there's you know literally hundreds of thousands that you pull through just to come up with schemes for a client. And then he just said, how do you come up with that? And I said, well, it's a ton of work. And it made me start thinking about, you know, how do normal people that aren't working with designers or architects have access to those materials?

1:51And if they did, how would they even put together schemes? It's almost impossible. So that's what made me think about how to come up with a system or a new type of business or way of looking at textiles in order to get it out to a lot more people. So that's how the Textilium project started. And also equally as important thing as I'm very attuned to all natural materials and fibers and how they can bring joy into your home and making something beautiful to live with. but also the fact that synthetic materials off-gas and there's situations now where, you know, homes are so tight that these materials have nowhere to breathe.

2:28So off-gassing is, if you think about it, if you open up a new box of sneakers and you get hit with that nasty smell, it's basically a chemical release into the air from petroleum-based products. So that's what off-gassing is. I'm all into 100 % natural textiles, and I transferred that same ethos into the Textillion Project.

2:57We're thinking about our target audience as maybe 25 to 40. They're creatives, they're in communications, they're in artistic businesses and things like that, and they want to take pride in designing their own space. They have no interest in working with an architect or a designer like myself, but they really want to have access to the good stuff. So that's our target audience is someone who's a creative person that's successful because what we have is not inexpensive. It's expensive. It's the best of the best materials, but they want to work and create their own space. We hope to get out to many people that are looking to create a special environment for the home.

3:37And I think like down the road, I probably have guest designers put together schemes. So, you know, I have 90 plus schemes that I put together that are thousands of hours of work. But I feel like maybe bringing in other interior designers, putting together vision that they have with our same format, I think could be very interesting.

4:03when we're thinking about putting together concepts and schemes so first of all i think about nature and you know the outside world and how it inspires the inside world so as i'm thinking about those things we think of color context is the number one thing it's how colors are affected by surrounding colors contrasting colors paired together and cause hues to appear completely different than when they reviewed singularly. I look at saturation. I'm interested in high saturated textiles so that, you know, some of them actually have much more pop than others. So it creates more interest in terms of contrast with saturation.

4:39We think about textural contrast. So again, we like things that are have like a handmade woven thick weave compared to things that are smooth and shiny. We look, take our cues from nature, like I said before. So we, think about things in the outside world. So you think of places that you've traveled and been to, and those things a lot of times give drive what interior spaces are all about. So if you have your living room and it has colors and textures that remind you of a beautiful hiking trip you took in Patagonia, it's something that's personal and special to you. So we think about those things, putting together the schemes.

5:16Color blocking is a big one for me. So a lot of times we deal with a lot of solids but when we put them together like the toss pillows or upholstered pieces might be brighter or darker and they have their own kind of identity within the scheme and that actually makes like a more interesting composition in my opinion and of course personal taste is the last one then and that is you know very subjective but to me personal taste is about discovering things that you think maybe aren't obvious to others that might look beautiful to you and maybe you're present it in a way that people might be inspired by that.

5:53So that's, those are the six criteria that we use to putting together schemes. I think when things are inspired by nature, they're not trendy, they're not something that will go in and out of style. You know, when I think about interiors, I don't want things to be going out of style in two years, because if you have a very beautiful piece of fabric that's on your sofa, you don't want to throw it out in three years time. You want it to last 10, 15, 20 years.

6:34That was Frank Roop, the founder and owner of the Textilium Project, and you can learn more about the business by heading to textilium.com. And that's all for this episode of Eureka. We'll be back at the same time next week. The programme was produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. Listen again and find out more at monocle.com. That's where you can join the club and subscribe to Monocle magazine or follow us and catch up with the archive wherever you get your audio. If you'd like to reach the team, email Laura on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to Eureka.