Makers

Atelier N sees the self not as separate from nature, but as part of a world that is always changing, shaped by the relationships and encounters along the way. Clay is never just something to be shaped. It holds traces of the past, responds to the present and carries possibilities for what comes next. In the studio, hands meet earth, water, air and fire, and together they create forms that can never be fully predicted. Rather than imposing form, she listens to the material, letting its resistance and unpredictability guide the process.This is both an artistic and an ethical practice, grounde...

Bert & May began in 2004, when Lee Thornley left London for Andalucía to rescue old tiles from Spanish homes and buildings. What started as a reclaimed tile business grew in 2010, when he met Juanma, whose family had made encaustic tiles by hand for generations, and together they reopened the family workshop. Today they still salvage and hand clean antique tiles in Cádiz, alongside handmade tiles from makers in Spain and Morocco.

CoFlora was founded in the Netherlands by Dana Liv, who came to design through environmental science. She works with rural artisan communities in Portugal, where cork is stripped by hand from the bark of living cork oaks and grows back every nine years without a tree being felled. Trained artisans, many of them women paid fair wages, slice the bark into fine veneers and lay them piece by piece onto a backing. The result is a surface that carries the real grain of the tree, made in a way that keeps cork forests valuable and standing.

Luke and Catherine spent fifteen years designing prints for fashion before turning their attention to walls. Their London studio still works the same way: every design begins as an original drawing or brushstroke, inspired by antique botanical illustration and historic textiles, and those marks stay visible in the finished piece. Each wallpaper roll is printed to order in the UK with water based inks on paper from managed forests, so nothing sits in a warehouse waiting to be wanted.The same hand-painted designs are also made into fabric in the UK, printed on soft cotton as standard. Use the...

Leaf & Loom is a Somerset studio devoted to one fibre: hemp. Founder Camilla Pugh has worked with it for over fifteen years and set out to show it at its best. People tend to picture hemp as rough and rustic, but these fabrics are refined and made to last. There are heavy canvases and twills for upholstery, and softer cloths for curtains and cushions, in pure hemp or blended with linen, cotton or silk. The European hemp is grown in France, the Netherlands and Germany, then woven in Eastern Europe by mills they've worked with for years.

Patrícia Gomes and Luís Lima are architects, and Matterpieces began with a contradiction. While renovating a vegan restaurant in Vienna, they were searching for sustainable materials as the demolition waste piled up on site. Back in Portugal, they started mixing crushed brick, concrete and glass by hand in a family garage in Porto. Today they turn that rubble into tiles, slabs and worktops, and each colour carries a trace of the buildings it came from.