How to use fabric and texture to make a home feel warm and lived in

A room can have the right paint colour and the right sofa and still feel flat. Usually what’s missing is texture. Fabric is the quickest way to add it, and it’s one of the few design choices you feel as well as see.

A new collaboration between textile house James Dunlop and Australian designer Sarah Ellison is a useful guide. Their partnership began with a conversation about traditional mohair velvet and how to reinterpret it through an Australasian lens.

Over several years, Sarah and the James Dunlop team explored colour, texture and materiality. Homage is their first release.

Start with how you live

Sarah’s starting point is practical. “I’m designing for myself at the end of the day,” she says. “Being a parent with a kid and eating on the couch, practical stuff always plays a role.”

Before you fall for a swatch, think about who sits where, whether the dog gets on the furniture, and how much sun hits the room. Ask your supplier how an upholstery fabric wears and cleans. Keep the delicate weaves for cushions, curtains or a chair that doesn’t get daily use.

Texture works through contrast. Velvet’s pile catches the light and deepens its colour, so it reads very differently from flat linen or a nubbly wool beside it. A few different surfaces in the same palette give a room depth without adding more colour.

When you do want more colour, fabric is a low-risk place to try it. The James Dunlop team encouraged Sarah to move past the warm neutrals she’s known for, and her fashion background brought something new to their palette.

If your home leans beige, try a richer tone on a cushion or an occasional chair. Either is easier to change than a wall.

Old and new

“I’m always trying to inject a kind of mood or a feeling or nostalgia into things,” says Sarah, “but then bring it forward and make it feel classic.”

That idea runs through Homage, which takes a traditional material and gives it a more relaxed, modern feel. A velvet armchair next to a clean-lined timber table, or a heritage weave on a simple modern sofa, lets a room nod to the past without looking like a period set.

Homage is the first chapter of an ongoing partnership and is available now through James Dunlop Textiles. For your own place, bring home samples, look at them in daylight and lamplight, and put your hand on them before you commit.