Chippendale Couch Bed Bolling Hall

Bolling Hall, Bradford, West Yorkshire.

Bolling Hall is one of the oldest buildings in Bradford and has previously been a family home for over 500 years. It is now a museum, gallery and education centre offering visitors a fascinating journey through the lives and times of the Bradford families who called the hall their home. This includes two important land-owning families, the Bollings and the Tempests.

With parts of the building dating from the Medieval, Bolling Hall is a rambling mixture of styles with every nook and cranny packed with history. During the Civil War the household supported the Royalist cause, and the house provided a stronghold during the ‘siege of Bradford’.

 

Chippendale Couch Bed

Bolling Hall Chippendale Couch Bed Hangings.

The rooms at Bolling Hall are furnished and decorated to give an accurate taste of life at different periods of the house’s history, and the fascinating furniture on display includes a superb bed made for Harewood House by Thomas Chippendale.

Humphries Weaving supplied pure silk damask in crimson for hangings on the Chippendale Couch Bed whilst the bed was still at Harewood House. When the bed was sold to Bolling Hall the museum commissioned further weaving for the crimson wall hangings.

The Jacquard cards for the design were newly cut and saved by Richard Humphries when Warner and Sons Ltd, Braintree ceased manufacturing. The fabric was hand woven by Peter Gowers and was particularly difficult due to the placement of the design and large areas of satin running along the edge of the cloth. 

The Humphries Archive holds several versions of this design, and the Warner Textile Archive has a similar one first produced in 1901, you can read bout it’s origin in our article ‘Christchurch Mansion‘.

Project reference: 285 & 312

 

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