Gainsborough Silk

The Gainsborough Silk Weaving Company was established in 1903 by Reginald Warner, and is one of Britain's last remaining jacquard weaving mills. He set it up at Sudbury in Suffolk, which had been a centre of silk weaving since Huguenot weavers arrived there in the nineteenth century.

Its first commission was from the White Star Line: a bespoke green damask, designed in 1903, for the walls of the first-class dining room of the RMS Titanic. Liberty, Henry Ford and William Morris and Co were customers from the earliest days. Since 1981 Gainsborough has held a Royal Warrant for walling, curtains and upholstery in royal palaces including Buckingham Palace, St James's Palace, Kensington Palace and Windsor Castle.

Every fabric the mill has ever woven is sampled and recorded in its design archive, which now runs to more than seven thousand historic references, so the studio can recreate, rescale and recolour from any of them. The mill runs three kinds of loom, traditional dobby, jacquard shuttle and modern rapier, and its sister company Heritage Trimmings makes the passementerie.

This is the house for a piece that deserves it: a chair going back into a listed room, or a set of curtains meant to outlive everyone in the house. It is not a cheap cloth and we would not pretend otherwise.