Passion for Pattern
If there’s one word that could describe interior designer Jeffrey Bilhuber’s style, it’s confident. An amazing eye for mixing pattern, colour and objects, along with a sensitivity to historical detail, has put him at the forefront of the industry in his native US: he is on Architectural Digest‘s AD100 list and Elle Decor’s A-List, and his clients have included Anna Wintour and Elsa Peretti. He’s now brought that same confidence to a range of fabrics for California-based Le Gracieux, available at Tissus d’Hélène.
“It’s a very immersive collection – you can dive in,” he says of the eight fabrics, whose names all begin with a ‘B’ (pictured above are ‘Beekman’, Bennett’, ‘Burton’ and ‘Bromley’). Despite their different scales and patterns, from bold florals to grids and chevrons, they have been designed to work together: layering seemingly disparate patterns is one of the real skills of interior design, but here, Bilhuber has done all the work.
“I wanted to do a collection where the craftspeople and designers meet as equals,” says Bilhuber, and the hand-printing techniques for which Le Gracieux is known lend that indefinable soul and character to the fabrics. Bilhuber also remarks that he sees this collection as marking a sea-change in taste: “Design is moving into a much more three-dimensional world. You want humanity and a heart, and you want things which have a real narrative to them.”
