Bernie de Le Cuona on creating one of Britain’s best fabric brands

Bernie de Le Cuona’s obsession with linen began in the early 1990s on a visit to Brussels, where she discovered the supple tactility of vintage Belgian tablecloths. It kick-started what has become a 30-plus-year journey for the South African-born, Windsor-based fabric designer, taking her around the world in search of the best-quality natural fibres, weaving mills and craftspeople, and garnering early fans such as fashion designer Ralph Lauren and interior designer Nicky Haslam.

‘When I first started, what people wanted and needed was very different. I remember the days of very heavy interlined curtains and three tablecloths layered and draped to the floor over a round table,’ she recalls. Her own instinct at the time for ‘more relaxed, lived-in’ spaces encouraged her to eschew what others were doing and forge her own pared-back, neutrally hued path.

Through trial and error, de Le Cuona has built a fabric house renowned for ‘gutsy linen, couture silk, super-fine merino and the softest cashmere created with minimal impact on the environment’ in ‘quiet, comfortable’ dusty and earthy shades reminiscent of her own bushveld roots.

Innovation has been key ever since the former interior architect turned ‘queen of linen’ first learned to hand weave on a trip to Bihar in India, where artisans working at home showed her how they hand loomed tussah silk. On returning to Europe, de Le Cuona sent flax to them to be woven into bolts of fabric, but it came off the loom ‘as hard as a coir mat,’ she remembers. Tasked with how to relax it, she drew inspiration from noticing on her trip how silk was being beaten over logs to soften it – instead of beating it by hand with a hammer, she experimented, creating a process of tumbling the fabric with golf balls until it had the same floppy, faded finish of the Belgian cloth she’d fallen in love with.

Now, with showrooms in London and New York, and a flagship store located at the heart of Pimlico Road, de Le Cuona has forged a reputation for always thinking outside the box. Some of the brand’s most unusual designs have become the brand’s most successful, such as ‘Artist Canvas’, a densely woven linen painted on one side and then washed with pumice stones. ‘People looked at me as if I was mad,’ she recalls, ‘but it is now the most popular fabric we have worldwide. It caught people’s imagination.’

Principal Royal Ballet dancers Edward Watson and Matthew Ball have modelled in various fabric campaigns; a Revitalise service was recently introduced, allowing customers to return old De Le Cuona fabrics, such as curtains, to be unpicked and refashioned into a bedspread, cushions or as upholstery for a chair or stool; and in 2020, her ‘Pure’ organic, chemical-free, socially and sustainably responsible linen was certified to the highest standards by the Global Organic Textile Standard, an industry first.

This season, De Le Cuona is launching ‘Life’, a collection of ‘really unusual, crafted, beautiful things’ sourced from around the world, taking the brand out of the home and into the world of things ‘people can live with, wear and take travelling’. Crafted in ultra-fine cashmere, wild silk and softer-than-soft llama and alpaca wools, using ‘colours of the earth, nature and the country that they come from’, the range includes throws, ponchos, blankets and shawls.

‘People want a bit of excitement. They want the unusual and to see us doing different things,’ de Le Cuona says. ‘For me, it’s about creating things of the highest quality that will grow with you and become treasures,’ delecuona.com