JR Artisan Spotlight

My family comes from a long line of people involved in the arts – the most famous of these were Laurence Whistler, who died the year after I founded Ben Whistler in 2000. He received many commissions from the royal family for his crystal engraving, and was the first president of the Guild of Glass Engravers. His brother Rex was a painter of portraits who died in Normandy in 1944, reputedly The Times received more letters about his death than any other. He was known by other soldiers for having a bucket with his paintbrushes hanging off the side of his tank. 

Art, antiques and design has always been in the family, I funded much of my time through college by upholstering small pieces of furniture and selling them for enough to get to the end of the week. The first property I owned was a small beach house built up on boulders, on the remote and then undiscovered island of Likoma in Malawi that was built with a friend who had moved out there. That project introduced me to a totally different way of working with space and materials, and I carry a very special part of my heart for Africa always. 

After this reality struck, and I knew I didn’t want to work in the city, my brother and I fell into the idea of legacy upholstery with all the qualities and hallmarks of the British way. This whole story is marked with lucky encounters and making friends, but one of the very first people we met was Nicky Haslam, a designer who immediately got the joke and loved how we were doing things differently. Through Nicky we met more and more designers who felt the same way we did about how furniture should look, feel and be constructed, and who understood the relationships were as important as the work. I count many top designers as personal friends only because we went through this whole adventure together, and made mistakes, and had fun, along the way. 

Leather has always been a personal passion of mine, so the opportunity to start working with the best that Italy and Germany could offer was too good to pass up. Again, we made personal relationships with the owners of tanneries and local artisans who really understood what we were after. Because of this we get to see the innovations in new leather finishes and performance before most other people, and we are delighted to bring these items to market before most of the other businesses in the space, mostly because we are very much a small editor who is very closely connected, rather than a large scale business.