Inside Our Peak District Material Library

Our material library lives in a stone outbuilding near Hope, a short drive from the studio. It holds every sample we have specified since 2016: timber, stone, plaster, metal, fabric and leather.

Clients spend a morning there early in every project. We lay out a handful of materials on a long table under a north roof light and look at them for a while, in daylight, together.

It is the most useful hour of the design process. Choices that take weeks over email take minutes in the room, because you can see how an oak sits next to a limestone, or how a linen looks against plaster at four in the afternoon.

The library keeps growing. Every new maker we meet sends us a piece of their work, and some of the best projects began with an offcut on that table.