SILENCE OF THE GOATS. Millionaires, Goat skin walls and Buffalo Bill.

As an interior designer I see many fads come and go but once in a while you come across a project that tests your creative abilities to the maximum. These are the types of projects that leave a lasting impression and are the jobs you walk away truly proud of what you have created.

The Creative Brief

Last year I was working on a wonderfully demanding project, updating the interiors of a beautiful house in London for a lovely young couple with great taste and a very generous budget.

We worked from the basement to the top of the house creating stunning rooms using the finest fabrics, furniture and carpet makers but the living room was my favourite room, hands down. The clients' design brief was pretty straight forward, a living room that would hold the coolest and most chic parties ever. Knowing that this couple would be inviting the glitterati from all over the globe we decided that we would not hold back and would go all out using the most incredible artisans and materials available.

Vellum

We decided that the walls would be covered with goats vellum mounted on specially designed panels to fit the entire room. This is a very luxurious item that is pretty rare to see because it costs and arm and a leg but also because there is only one company in the UK that still makes vellum today.

What is Vellum? I hear you ask...

Vellum, also know as parchment, is the component created by using a very old technique of thinning and stretching out the skin of calfs and goats. A unique and natural material that has been used by mankind for hundreds of years for writing on as it preserves particularly well. The famous Magna Carta was written on parchment in the 11th Century.

A page from The Magna Carta

In interior design we use it on furniture and for making lampshades and sometimes, like in my story, we use it to cover the walls.

Technique

The technique to create paper-thin parchment has not changed since the 11th Century either. The skins are prepared by a thorough clean to remove all of the animals hair and stretched across wooden frames. They are soaked in a secret formula and then scraped with a very sharp lunellum which is a crescent shaped knife to thin out the skin, then they are left to dry out.

Vellum stretched out to dry

This method of wetting, drying out and scraping is repeated and repeated and REPEATED until you are left with a very fine piece of skin that is as thin and smooth as a piece of paper. Using the skin on the walls it must be applied to wooden panels. Two skins are used per panel, one on the front and the other to hold the panel's shape on the back and keep it from bending in time.

Nothing Goes To Waste

You might not be convinced by this idea of using an animals skin for aesthetic beauty, it might seem frivolous and like people have 'too much money' but there is no waste here. The skins are bought from an abattoir where the animals are killed for meat, so using the skin is actually a way of using all of the animal and not letting any part go to waste so to speak.

For the living room in London, as I mentioned above, we needed to design panels that would fit perfectly on each wall and look as identical in size as possible while leaving no part of the wall uncovered.

To give you an idea of this intricate task, imagine placing a grid on a rectangle shape, now look at your wall and see that it is not even and flat as a rectangle is but has columns, skirting, cornicing as well as windows and corners. We needed to create panels that would fit seamlessly into the room... you get the idea. Not an easy task. But once we had agonized over the panels for what seemed like a lifetime, we were ready to go.

The grids were sent to the joiners to make up the panels and the panels were sent to the vellum makers. In the UK right now there is only one acclaimed vellum maker based an hour or so outside of London in an area called Newport Pagnell.
I worked closely with the manager of this company, taking him to site to see the room, discussing what we were after, the look, the design and the overall finished look. I placed my order (and parted with a sizeable amount of money) and 16 weeks later the vellum covered panels were ready to install.

Or so we thought.

As the panels started to arrive we saw that the skins had been positioned incorrectly on the panels. Instead of the spines being vertical on the panels, they were placed horizontally, not the look we were going for at all.

FAR FROM IT.

This was a big fuck up. A HUGE fuck up.

As it takes 2 skins to make up a panel, one stretched on the front and one stretched on the back. There were around 280 panels, this meant we needed more than 560 skins right away to make up for this mistake. But, after taking into consideration the amount of time and preparation for the skins, this mistake was looking like it would put our room behind by at least four months, something that we could not allow having promised the client a ready room for a big Thanksgiving party.

A few sleepless nights later and the manager came back to me with a solution. A Russian oligarch had a delay on the manufacturing of his super yacht and would not need his vellum for another few months which meant his skins were freed up for us to take and luckily they were the correct size and natural finish. Thank you Russian oligarch super yacht's manufacturers' tardiness.

Having been scorched by the company's mistake once, my boss was not about to let it happen again and asked me to go to the workshop where the skins were prepared.

A week later I boarded the train out of Euston and was on my way to meet the manager and inspect the skins. The workshop, around 20 mins by taxi from the station, has been used by the business since the late 1800's and is based by a gushing river. It is a picturesque cottage with a concrete skeleton warehouse built onto it. As my taxi pulled up a light drizzle started and a mist fell, making it all suddenly feel a little eery. This wasn't helped by the manger materialising in the entrance in a long blue coat evoking the images of the psycho killer Buffalo Bill from the 1991 movie Silence of the Lambs in my mind. As I clambered out the taxi I reminded myself that a few people knew where I was and prayed he wasn't considering flaying me for his skin suit.

The manager in his creepy coat

Inside, the manager started a mini tour showing me the men at work slashing at the skins; this is fascinating work, one must have a delicate and precise touch, a cut at the wrong angle will just slice the skin in half making it redundant waste. We moved on and he proudly pointed out the sharp scalpel like knives and the hand made frames and other various items that looked like torture equipment, my cell phone not far from my fingertips in my coat pocket. Finally, we came to a large pile of skins, these were mine that I had come to shift through and check they were perfect. Here, I was left alone to make my way through the 500+ skins.

Some of the skins

Needless to say, all was well that ended well, our living room was ready for Thanksgiving and the party was a HUGE success. I'd love to show you finished images but cannot post anything due to client confidentiality.

However, I want you to understand how beautiful vellum is and I have attached images for you to get a sense of the subtle grandeur of the room and the elegance.

Each time I return to the house for a small job here and there, I always stop into the room just to take it all in again and it never ceases to impress me.

In reality, standing in the room there are no words for describing the way in which the light in the room changes throughout the day and how it glows warmly at night, the colours of the parchment that with time age so beautifully.

The mood board for the room

No piece is identical and even the acoustics of the room change and are softer.

Thank you for reading my post, my next post will be lowering the tone slightly and talking about how I can increase your chances of getting laid. So, if you like what you have read and would like to see more about interiors please follow me @natnot

I insist!

Natnot xx