ONE SMALL SEED MAGAZINE Issue #28 Digital 03 | Page 22

How did House of Hackney start?
HOH launched two and a half years ago in
Hackney in East London, myself and my husband
Javvy founded it. We are both product and fashion
designers and when we went to do up the interiors
of our home, we thought that there is a real gap
in the market for beautiful furnishings that use
beautiful fabrics. We wanted to buy something that
was made in England, which is very important to us.
We found that the market was very bland, a lot of
beige, it was quite neutral and we could not really
find the print we wanted for our own house, so we
launched HOH. We have lived in Hackney for 12
years, it’s a very interesting part of London and it’s a
real melting-pot of different cultures, different types
of people and a lot of creatives live in Hackney. As
Hackney’s roots lie in Victorian London, the Victorian
trend was quite important to us in our first collection.
You just talked about ‘Made in England’, what
is England’s DNA for you or England’s roots, or
London?
For us the aesthetic of our brand, which started
with interiors, has now has become a fashion and
interiors brand. The silhouettes, the shapes of the
interior products that we use are very much rooted
in traditional English furniture pieces. So for us it was
important that we actually went back to the real
craft of where and how those pieces were made,
and work with traditional artists and makers in the
UK to recreate that traditional look. But what we
wanted to do was to make something quite modern,
so juxtaposing the shapes with our prints for almost
like a clash between two things which became
something contemporary and which has become
our brand DNA really. Mixing the traditional with our
prints to make it feel quite progressive. This is why
England is so important for us.