Surrey Homes | SH31 | May 2017 |Restoration & New Build supplement inside

Above: Manga drawings lie on the surface of Daisy’s desk. She’s currently studying art and design at a local college
Up the steps to the sunny front living room and one can’t
help keeping one’s eyes peeled for more geometric Yateley
Papers designs – which I spot pretty quickly in the form of
files on the bookshelves and on a couple of lampshades: “That
one’s called Kite – it’s a new one that hasn’t come out yet and
this one is called Chrome, which only comes in a very dark,
smoke colour,” says Trudi. It’s funny how, once you start
looking for geometric designs, you spot them everywhere...
The 3-D wallpaper on the ceiling – original 19th-century
‘Anaglypta’ according to Trudi – the grille on the hallway
radiator, and even the frosting on the front windows.
With Trudi’s background in fabric printing, I wonder
why they have not gone down that route? “We concentrate
on paper, not because we don’t want to do textiles, but
textiles are a massive investment and also, having printed
textiles for so long, it’s the ‘fixing’ that’s a challenge.
Fixing can be a little temperamental, unless you are
doing massive batches. At the moment we are quite
small and artisan, so we decided to concentrate on paper.
So, items such as lampshades are perfect for that.”
Their styling is equally well-considered: “Sophie and
I both love quite earthy, muddy colours and character
properties – so we wanted our designs to work with old
and new. So, that lampshade design would work well in a
minimalist, contemporary home but it also sits comfortably
in a character room. That’s what we work hard at to
achieve.” It’s clear that with such talent and ability, they
have to curb their enthusiasm at times too: “We have to
rein ourselves in, as we’re both creative and we think ‘Oh,
we could do this, and we could do that! Sometimes we
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