The very best interiors require the very best in soft furnishings. If you haven’t (yet) heard of Ryan Whittaker and Pete Eastwood (aka The Boys Who Sew) don’t be too hard on yourself. But maybe if your interior designer isn’t familiar with their work, you should reconsider your life choices.
The Boys Who Sew are the go-to guys for some of the country’s top interiors experts, especially if the project calls for dramatic drapery. Based in the glorious grounds of Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire – but coming to a small screen near you via their social media channels – I met up with Ryan and Pete over Zoom to learn more their fascination with fabric, and their passion for championing tradition and technique.
First things first, how did the business come about?
Ryan: We set up about seven years ago as The Boys Who Sew, because we'd always been known affectionately by our clients over the years as the boys who sew, although we're middle-aged men now! It was going really well, and then all of a sudden, lockdown hit and all our clients cancelled overnight. We were less than 12 months in, and it was a really dire state of affairs. We sat down with every single interior magazine we had, finding every interior designer that we could get hold of and sent personal emails to every single one of them. Within 24 hours, we had our first inquiry. And from that came the next, and the next one, and it just snowballed.
And your fabulous location in the grounds of a castle?
Ryan: We were getting all this business through from London interior designers mainly, and then one day we were in Berkeley Castle fitting some curtains for Mrs Berkeley, and we said to her, "we’re doing all these massive curtains, but we can't keep going in the garden shed’. She got us into her Volvo, down to the Berkeley Estate Yard, said, ‘Which barn would you like?’ There were all these beautiful derelict barns that hadn't been used for donkey’s years. We worked with the estate team, and a team of architects, and renovated one of the old granary buildings. It’s in the most glorious setting and all of the team have views of horses to the back, and fields at the front.
Pete: It is just a wonderful place. And then fast forward a couple of years, we grew the team, and in the last five years, it's gone from us in the garden shed to 21 people.
Ryan: It's just so lovely because we work with some of the best designers in the country. We do a lot in London, the Cotswolds, Oxford, and what's really refreshing is we get a lot of designers coming to us saying ‘I've just got my new client and they’re adamant that we use The Boys Who Sew’. How did that even happen?
What are you working on now?
Ryan: We're doing a lot more international work, and we’ve now got a second building here on the estate yard. It’s where all the cartwheels would have been made and now where our head office is based. We've got a product development room – we're always learning new skills – and then we've got this glorious space, which is the Sanderson Garden Room, sponsored by Sanderson. Everything in here is very traditional and beautiful. From the beginning of October, we're going to be doing weekly videos from here, aimed towards luxury interior designers, to teach various traditional techniques. We're going to be inviting well-known designers and industry experts to come down here and [take part]. It will be so much fun.
What do you think marks The Boys Who Sew out as different?
Pete: I think it's a combination of things. I think there are four to five thousand curtain makers in the UK, but there's maybe a dozen that do it like us, and we're probably high up on that dozen now. It's very hard to know, because a lot of these people have had their customers for 40 years and don't have a website because they don't need a website. The size of the curtains [we are able to make] puts us in quite a limited range, and then we also measure, make, and install, which a lot of curtain makers don’t. We do the whole shebang, and we're not the only ones doing that, but there's a very limited number in the UK and increasingly, as you can imagine, they're retiring. I always I joke – but it’s getting less true every year – that I'm in this because I'm still a youngster in this industry.
Ryan: We met Lisa Montague [CEO at Sanderson Design Group], and she was shocked when she saw the average age of our work group is 28. People often say to us, ‘How do you get curtain makers that are, that young?’ And we're like, ‘Well, we train them from start to finish, and we don't often lose staff either’. A lot of those people have been with us since they were 18, and they're still here and they're loving it. It's just so refreshing to see young people in such a traditional industry.
I think the big thing is not accepting the status quo, not accepting that you can't do this, you can't do that. We're just, to hell with that. Yes, you can. We've got the space, because we're rural. We've got room to do things, which is great, and we can retain the team because they're in a beautiful set of grounds.
Pete: Most of the curtain makers in the country are one-man bands or a couple of people working together. Lots of them will have done it because it fitted around bringing up children: mostly it's women, and they ended up having a business, but it's often in the garden, or in the garden shed, or the garage, or upstairs bedrooms. There's not many of us that have this big workforce so if someone says, ‘I've got a job in Texas’, we say, ‘Right, we're on a flight’, because we need to pay this workroom every week, and that's what we do.
Ryan: With our background in interior design as well, we completely understand both sides of the coin. We absolutely understand interiors completely, and a lot of designers come to us and come up with schemes that are completely off the wall. They want to break the barriers down of what they can achieve in the space, and we're able to go in and go, ‘yeah, we can do that’, or if it's just not possible, we know why and we tell them.
Any chance I can persuade you to be indiscreet about any of your projects or clients?
Pete: Unfortunately, we have lots of NDAs. There are some rock stars and people we’ve worked with, but we're not allowed to say. We do a lot for a designer called Sean Symington, who is hot at the moment – we do most of his work. And then we work with VSP Interiors, who are the stately home people. We do an awful lot for Henriette von Stockhausen.
Ryan: We have a very, very famous pop star who is messaging about us going to LA to see her, so we do seem to be getting a really lovely name for ourselves. We're also doing work with Liberty next year, and there’s all the content that we're doing in the Sanderson Room, which will go out on Sanderson’s socials, which is huge.
What new trends do you see coming through in interiors?
Ryan: It's interesting because I'd say 10 years ago everything was bright and colourful, Timorous Beasties pattern and all of that stuff, but things have been getting more traditional as time has gone on. Swags are coming back, everything is clothed – like tables with wonderful skirts on them – and it's becoming more English, more traditional, more like a room that looks like your grandma probably had it done in the 1950s by some very famous Sibyl Colefax interior decorator.
Whether that will hit a plateau and then we go back to the 1990s sort of white and black look I don't know, but at the moment it's, ‘I want London blinds, I want skirts on every table, I want gathered bed valances.’ I love all of that. All the international work we're getting at the moment is for ‘the English look’, and the fact that we can make it a castle works quite nicely.
And a final question; if you were forced to decorate your own home from the high street, where would you go?
Pete: Well, I'd go to an independent. A diminishing independent.
I’m not sure that’s in the spirit of the question…
Ryan: Do you know what? I can't believe I'm saying this, but I bloody love Marks and Spencer. I don't think they're leading with anything cutting edge, but they've got some great products you can mix in with some amazing things, and you know it's going to last you a lifetime.
Find out more at theboyswhosew.co.uk
