Florence Broadhurst: The Designer Who Started at Sixty
Florence Broadhurst started her wallpaper business in Sydney in 1959, when she was about 60. By the early 1970s she had around 800 designs, most of them big, graphic and fearless with colour: peacocks, cranes, oversized florals and geometrics that still look strikingly modern today.
Her designs are still printed by Signature Prints in Australia, by hand, using her original screens. That matters more than it sounds. Hand printing gives a depth of colour and a slight unevenness across the repeat that a digital print simply cannot copy, and it is the reason I use her fabric rather than a lookalike.
The cushions on Cushionbank are made from those prints in my Devon workroom. Most are in the teal colourway on a biscuit hopsack, a coarse, textured ground that softens her graphic line and makes the designs far easier to live with than you might expect from such a bold archive.
A life that reads like a novel
Florence was born in 1899 on a cattle station in Queensland. In the 1920s she toured South East Asia and China as a singer under the stage name Bobby, then opened a school of music and dance in Shanghai. By the 1930s she was in London, working as a dress designer in New Bond Street. She came home to Australia in 1949, took up painting, and only turned to wallpaper ten years later.
She was killed in her Paddington studio in 1977, aged 78, and the case has never been solved. It is a sad end, but her work is the better story: a woman who found her real calling at an age when most people are slowing down.
The designs I have
The Cranes. Her birds drawn in a fine line, teal on biscuit hopsack. As a square backed in teal chenille, a rectangle, or backed in teal velvet with piping.
Circles and Squares. A bold geometric. The teal oblong is the graphic one; the natural is tone on tone, so the pattern reads as texture and shadow rather than contrast.
Slub. One of her simplest designs, a broken line that behaves more like a woven slub than a print. The easiest way in if you are nervous of pattern.
Japanese Floral. Chalk white chrysanthemums on an olive green ground. A different colourway from the teal pieces, so it works on its own or with plain olive and cream.
How to use them
The teal pieces share a colourway and a ground, so they mix without any effort. Put The Cranes square at the back, Circles and Squares in front and Slub as the long cushion in the middle, then add a plain in teal or biscuit. They sit well on grey, stone and warm white upholstery.
Every cushion is handmade in my Devon workroom from the last of my Florence Broadhurst fabric, so there are only a few of each, and once they are gone they are gone. You can see them all in the CB Collection. If you would like a different size, get in touch and I will check whether there is enough fabric left.