This month marks a decade since the Humphries Weaving Company returned to their first ever business premises, Ashburton Lodge in Sudbury, Suffolk.
The firm first set up at Ashburton Lodge in 1972, with a small team weaving orders on narrow hand looms. It is documented in ‘Our Heritage’ how the business flourished and a larger footprint was required to house the growing number of looms to satisfy production. These expansions lead to a move away from Ashburton Lodge to two further premises in Essex, where we contiinued to develop our reputation as one of the most prestigious weaving mills in England.
As the company’s stature and prestigious client base continued to rise, the weaving industry also evolved. Developments in CAD technology and loom capabilities meant that efficiencies in time and space became the standard. Humphries Weaving relished the opportunity to return home to Ashburton lodge in 2004 to embrace this new era for weaving mills in England.
The first project undertaken after the move was for Historic Royal Palaces at Windsor Castle to weave fine silk damask in a stunning Prince of Wales green. This project tested all the skills of the business, from matching archive colour references, hand drawing the design, translating this to CAD and weaving hundreds of metres of rich fabric on state of the art rapier looms.
Since the Kings’ Galleries at Windsor Castle opened with much public fanfare, Humphries Weaving have proudly completed over five hundred projects and remain one of the few weaving company’s in the country that create such specialist textiles. The team continue to embrace new technologies, using their skills to create contemporary designs alongside transferring period designs from the company’s extensive archives. As we enter 2015 we look forward to the next decade of the Humphries Weaving story.
To read more about the projects we have worked on click here. You can also follow us on Instagram were we share behind the scenes photos from the weaving mills in England, our fabrics and the development involved with bringing our clients vision to life.
