It's not just somewhere to put your arseA good stool can make all the difference
‘I love my new office chair’ is a statement I never expected to be proud of making.
I don’t have a desk. Instead I move between a cutting table, where I stand or sit and a small coffee table with an old armchair where I drink coffee and think. This is all in an open plan office-come-workshop space that also holds our archive of HebTroCo garments and vintage pieces.
The cutting table is where we measure and quality check our stock. Patterns are laid out and adjusted, cloth is cut, samples developed. Meetings are held round this table. It’s the creative hub that we all gather round.
HebTroCo designer Amelia and myself use this massive table for our daily desk work. Up to now we’ve been sitting on a mismatched, flimsy and squeaky pair of breakfast bar stools. I grabbed them off the street, outside somebody’s house with a ‘please take me’ note stuck on them. Making do was a good place to start but really we needed to make our work space more conducive to creativity!
The rest of the team in their own spaces have more conventional office chairs, apart from brant who sits on a re-purposed beer keg in a cupboard.
I’ve been looking for a while for something fitting for me and Amelia to sit on and finally found just the thing at Pool Bank Vintage Interiors. Situated in an old mill between Otley and Harrogate in North Yorkshire they buy, restore and sell stylish furniture and furnishings made in the prime time of the mid twentieth century. It’s the equivalent of the vintage clothes shops that I dig up garment inspiration in.
Ian Apples runs Pool Bank and he’s also a HebTroCo customer. I quote, “the only problem with your jeans is that I want to wear them all the time because they make all my other jeans look shit”.
I chose three bar stools from his well stocked and very funky showroom. They originally sat at the bar in a working men’s club up in the Yorkshire Dales area. I only needed two but it was too good not to get the third. The bases are made from heavy steel, ideal for holding a man and his pint steady. This weight also has the advantage of stopping the stool from being stolen or used in a bar fight, qualities that will be useful for us at HebTroCo. They are the perfect match for our cutting table, custom fabricated for us with a steel frame, boarded top and underneath storage space, all done by our neighbour Alex at Bespoke Fabrication GB.
The stool tops have been reupholstered by Ian’s team in a British Camira wool fabric, the perfect finishing touch for us. Strong design, great backstory, heavyweight, made to last, fantastic fabric: the perfect perches for us to get creative and come up with practical, exciting and hard wearing British clothes for men.
Ed Oxley