Despite a wholesale shift to more personal, colourful interiors in the years since Covid, consumers still find it difficult to imagine fabrics in their space. Whether you’re reupholstering a sofa or a chair, or planning new curtains, the challenge of taking a small piece of fabric and imagining it on a larger scale is often insurmountable. “We call it the imagination gap,” says Roger Bridge, head of marketing and global development at James Dunlop Textiles. “Consumers find it hard to go from a sample of fabric to what it’s going to look like.”
About five years ago, James Dunlop embarked on a massive research project in an effort to work out how they could bridge that gap. What they discovered was that homeowners find the entire process intimidating and confusing. “They often find it difficult because they don’t know what to expect, or how to plan for it,” says Bridge.
Understandably, most home-builders and renovators still default to safe neutrals. In response, the brand – which doesn’t sell directly to the public but supplies through fabric stores, interior designers and architects – developed a digital solution. “The biggest thing we see is that the customer will go to grey or beige because they can’t visualise what [other fabrics] will look like in a bigger piece,” he says. “We wanted to give them an opportunity to explore colour – to get them into something a bit more exciting.”
At its core is a database of 15,000 digital texture files. As well as colour, these files record all the unique characteristics of each fabric. “Is it matte? Is it lustrous? What kind of hand [feel] does it have? How does it react to light? Is it transparent?”
It’s an extraordinary proposition, allowing a new level of visualisation. James Dunlop has developed a series of archetypal rooms that you can play around with on their website to give you an idea of how each fabric performs. For those shopping for new furniture, they’ve also worked with brands, including Città, Tim Webber and Simon James, to digitise furniture designs that can be digitally reupholstered with James Dunlop fabrics. As Bridge jokes, the brand has ended up with “maybe one of the biggest collections of 3D furniture models in Australasia”.
Most excitingly, the digital files can be imported into a huge range of architectural rendering programmes, allowing architects and designers to show you exactly how a fabric will look in any given room. While most programmes include a generic set of materials – everything from timber to stone – it’s not always possible to get this level of specificity or test out exact products. “It’s not just a photo, it’s a digital twin of our products,” says Bridge. “The difference that makes is you can get a realistic effect of what it will look like in your space.”
All of which, you’d hope, might encourage notoriously risk-averse New Zealanders – and their designers – to continue to play with more colour and texture in their interiors. “We’re part of everyone else’s creations – oftentimes we’re the most decorative part,” says Bridge. “We want to help instill the confidence to be bold and brave. Because while we do beige better, we’re pretty keen to make things more striking.”
James Dunlop Textiles
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