Beatrice Larkin is a textile designer based in Margate, Kent. She specialises in woven textiles, accessories and interior products. Her fabrics are recognisable for their softened geometric patterns in a pared down colour palette, all woven in the UK.
Bea’s hand drawn sketches run through all her woven designs. The marks made when she first put pen to paper are still noticeable in the finished fabric. The Jacquard loom allows her to create intricate patterns, picking up these inky lines and blotches, broken geometrics and blurred edges.
Inspiration for designs comes from all sorts of places. Bea is drawn to broken line and pattern and the balance between strict mathematical geometry and the impact of the hand, always leaning toward the human touch and the beauty of imperfection. She has a love for traditional weave structures (and manipulating these), grids, graphs and stationery, quilts, West African textiles and The Bauhaus.
Initial sketches are turned into weaves, playing with scale and repeat, focussing on the structure and design of the cloth in equal measure.
Production takes place in the North of England and Bea works with highly skilled manufacturers who understand the care and attention needed for the high-end textile market. The fabrics are woven in small runs at a Jacquard mill in Lancashire and then washed and finished in the Yorkshire Dales.
There are currently two materials in the collection: merino wool for throws, cushions and accessories, and the more robust recycled cotton suitable for cushions, upholstery and curtains. The Italian spun merino wool is more commonly used in the fashion industry for high end knitwear and the fine, soft fibres of the merino sheep give a beautifully soft and luxurious handle, perfect for throws and accessories like hot water bottles.
The more recently launched cotton collection is woven from rejected fabrics from the clothing industry, re-spun and ready for a new purpose.
Bea was fortunate to grow up surrounded by beautiful fabrics with her father running a little interior design shop in Canterbury and her mother, a self-employed embroiderer and quilter. This early love for fabrics led her to study BA Textile Design specialising in weave at Chelsea College of Art, followed by a masters at the Royal College of Art which she completed in 2013.
Bea’s RCA final collection gained interest from buyers such as Heal’s and so after graduating she began the search for a British mill that could produce her designs to scale. In 2015 Daylesford Organic helped fund her first run of fabric which was woven in the Cotswolds and Yorkshire. This collection was sold at Daylesford and the launching pad for future manufacturing. In Spring 2017 she started selling at Heal’s and launched her first collection at Clerkenwell Design Week.
Since then Bea has grown her business, working with a number of well-known brands and expanding her range, most recently creating soft furnishing fabrics for upholstery. She’s sold to retail, interior designers, hotels and galleries as well as working on bespoke commissions and collaborations. Customers include Heal’s, Daylesford Organic, Made, Studio Ashby, Conran and Partners, The Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation, The Tate Modern and Piglet in Bed.
