Manuel Canovas

Manuel Canovas was founded in 1963 and acquired by Colefax and Fowler in 1998. The design studio is on rue Royale in Paris, and it is the French voice among the five fabric brands Colefax Group plc sells.

The house is known above all for its spectacularly coloured toiles de jouy and its large-scale pictorial papers, which hold the fine detail of engraved historic scenes at wall size. The fabric collections run to embroideries, woven plains in very long colour ranges, velvets, damasks and stripes. Designs are drawn from rare archival documents and developed directly with artists and craftspeople, and the house also commissions new work from contemporary artists. Its Kashan embroidery, taken from the suzanis of Central Asia, won the Homes and Gardens Award for Best Embroidery Design.

Rivoli, the house cotton velvet, is made for both upholstery and curtains, and comes in a colour range longer than most houses offer on any cloth.

This is where we look when a client says the room is too safe. Cotton leads the compositions in our library, the cloth is usually 140cm wide, and composition, pattern repeat, fire code and care code are published on every piece we hold.