Rapture & Wright

The philosophy behind Rapture & Wright is to be 100% British. The cloth is woven in the UK. Designs are conceived and handprinted in their studio using skills that are rapidly disappearing in the UK.

WHO WE ARE

Rapture & Wright was started by Peter Thwaites and Rebecca Aird in 2004. She, a successful Graphic Designer, wanted a change from creating packaging for sweets and engine oil. He, an illustrator, had been working around the world for interior designers, creating exotic murals and wall finishes.

Artisans at heart, together they dreamed of turning their brimming portfolio of patterns, designed over the years, into a collection of fabrics and wallpapers. Confident that they could save the dwindling British textile industry by themselves, they built a hand printing table in a leaky barn and sought out the best suppliers across the British Isles.

WHAT WE DO

At the heart of the business is the workshop, one of the few remaining handprint studios in the UK. This is where ideas become designs and those designs become fabrics and wallpapers.

Small scale, artisan production is time consuming and physically demanding but the results are personal and subtly different, reflecting the hand of the maker. Far from being trapped by tradition, Rapture & Wright adapt age old techniques in clever ways to make fabrics and wallpapers for contemporary and classical tastes alike.

HOW WE DO IT

Rapture & Wright are one of the few remaining studios in the UK that print by hand. The tools they use are simple, the process has changed little over the years. By adapting these traditional techniques, the ambition is to combine the subtle and personal results of hand production with a flexibility of design able to satisfy today’s renewed taste for bespoke.

The design and production process goes something like this (in brief)

The finished design is copied onto a transparent films. These films are used to “etch” the image onto the printing screens, (one screen for each colour).

The inks are mixed to match our standard colour chart, or your bespoke colour swatch.

Meanwhile, the unprinted base fabric is rolled out onto the print table and ironed down. The pattern repeats on the print table are set precisely so that each section of the design will match up when we print.

The first colour is printed and the screen washed while that colour dries. The process is repeated for the subsequent colours. The fabric is rolled and cut to the ordered length.

Small scale production is time consuming, it can take a day for two people to print 30m of fabric, but the results are beautiful and unique.

Standen House project for The National Trust

Here’s a video about this exciting commission for the National Trust