Liberty

Arthur Lasenby Liberty borrowed 2,000 pounds from his future father-in-law in 1875 and took a building on Regent Street with three staff. The Tudor style shop on Great Marlborough Street followed in 1924, built in part from more than 24,000 cubic feet of ships' timbers.

Liberty began printing its own cloth after buying the Merton Print Works in 1904. Tana Lawn cotton, the fabric the name is now synonymous with, dates from the early 1930s and is named after Lake Tana in Ethiopia, where its long staple cotton fibres came from. It is woven from 70 and 100 ply yarns to a thread count of 240, and is printed at Liberty's own mill near Lake Como using a mix of traditional screen and digital printing. The in-house design studio was established in the early 1950s and still works in the rafters above the Great Marlborough Street store, reached by a wooden bridge.

Liberty Interiors draws its furnishing fabrics and wallpapers from the company archive, which Liberty describes as holding over 60,000 artefacts.

Tana Lawn is a dress-weight cotton, so on furniture it needs backing or it needs to stay off the seat. The interiors range is the one we work from for upholstery, and we will say which is which before anything is ordered.