Our first collaboration. Planted. x Sgrinhouse

Daisy Brazil
12 hours ago
3 min read

Planted, the British upholstery house built on old skills, has launched Alice — a new chair made in collaboration with hand screen-printing studio Sgrinhouse.

Named after Sgrinhouse founder Alice Smith, the chair is upholstered entirely — including its legs — in the studio’s hand screen-printed “Stripes” design, rendered in a rich rust colourway. The print gives the piece its sculptural, all-over presence: bold, considered, and unmistakably handmade.

TWO CRAFTS, ONE STANDARD

The collaboration began when Planted co-founder Daisy first saw Sgrinhouse at Chelsea Harbour

during Focus. “The fabric was clearly hand-printed — you could see straight away the difference

that quality makes,” she says. “We recognised the same standard in each other’s work

immediately.”

Planted had been developing a modern, armless bedroom chair without a clear form. “The fabric

gave us the answer,” Daisy says. “Simple from the front, with a hidden detail in the side shape

— the print shaped the proportions, right down to covering the legs.”

Every Alice is hand-built to order in Planted’s

Cotswolds workshop: nothing is made until

someone asks for it, so there is no stock, no

forecast run, and nothing goes to landfill

unused. Beneath the fabric, the chair is built

to Planted’s usual standard — a solid,

FSC-certified beech frame, hand-tied

springs, and a natural fill of latex, wool and

coco fibre, with no polyurethane foam and no

chemical treatments. “Each upholsterer

builds a piece from the frame up, and signs

their name to it,” Daisy says. “That’s the

accountability we build every piece on.”

Sgrinhouse, whose founder Alice Smith recently won “Best Newcomer in Fabric” by Homes &

Gardens for her textile design work, developed a new heavyweight fabric specifically to meet the

demands of upholstery — adapting pattern pieces to reduce waste as the design took shape.

Alice describes the studio’s process as bringing “craft and modernity together to create

beautiful, durable, timeless fabrics,” with every piece designed and hand-printed in-house.

“Stripes” draws on influences including Anni Albers and Agnes Martin, while its rust tone echoes

the maritime landscape running through the wider collection.

Making Alice this way is slower and more expensive than buying stock fabric off a roll — but it

means the chair and its print were considered together from the start, with nothing printed or

cut that the design did not need.

BUILT TO LAST, STYLED TO MOVE

“You can feel the difference the moment you sit down,” Daisy says. “Solid bones, nothing that will break down or need replacing.” Every Alice is designed to be reupholstered and passed on, not thrown

away. Though conceived as a bedroom chair, it has proved versatile across settings — a further, longer version is already in development for use at the end of a bed or in a bay window.

Both studios trace the collaboration to a shared belief in traditional skill, applied with a modern eye. “It’s about keeping skills alive by giving them somewhere relevant to go,” Daisy says.

In three words: craftsmanship, process, connection, says Alice. Purity, alignment, and connection, says Daisy — both landing on “connection” independently, which says a lot about how aligned this collaboration has felt from the start.