Themselves
Interior Products / Marketing Material / Nov '07
Multistorey have joined forces with Marcus James and Lulu Roper-Caldbeck to create a new interiors company called Themselves. Lulu works in fashion development, and Marcus as an artist, illustrator and fabric designer, whose clients include Chloé, the Rug Company and YSL.
First and foremost we are friends, with an appreciation of interior design, and Themselves was founded on our desire to both work together and create things for ourselves and our own homes.
The inaugural range is divided into two contrasting colour palettes: brightly coloured, modernist geometric patterns and softer organic tones with safari motifs. Hand printed onto fine linen and made into cushions, the hand drawn prints and patterns are framed with black piping, creating the illusion of three dimensional drawings. The cushions are a mixture of shapes and can be arranged into sculptural groupings — each cushion using a different print on the front and reverse allowing for countless combinations.
Accompanying the cushions we have a pair of rug designs, both graphic interpretations of animal skins. The rugs are printed by hand onto heavyweight floor canvas, and trimmed with coloured canvas tape. Both designs are also available as hand-knotted wool rugs with the help of Alain Rouveure. Alain established a fair-trade community project in 1979 with Himalayan crafts people. Our rugs are made-to-order using hand spun sheep’s wool and pure vegetable dyes.
We created the accompanying marketing material to introduce the concept of one idea split into two themes and colour palettes. We shot one main photo of a set we had built that uses one long wooden sofa that is split down the middle and each half was painted a different colour . The floor and wall behind the sofa was also split into the two halves and painted 2 colours to match the sofa. Onto this set we arranged the cushions and rugs in a way that at a glance it would look like each half was a mirror image of the other, but when you look more closely you see that there are two distinct ranges.
The logo has been drawn up to fit with the blocky style of the set build. Our intention is to create a new typographic logo of the word ‘Themselves’ for each new range that we design in the future. We like the idea of a logo evolving to suit it’s subject matter.