Mohair is one of the most luxurious upholstery fabrics you can buy, and one of the most expensive… which is exactly why we wanted to use it.
There are lovely fabrics, and luxurious fabrics, and then there is mohair.
It comes from the Angora goat and produces an extraordinary velvet: immensely soft, wonderfully lustrous and, despite appearances, remarkably tough and resilient too. Rohan describes sitting on it as being a little like sitting on one of those enormous teddy bears you win at the fair, except it’s made from natural fibres and is much better suited to a sitting room.
Look closely at the fabric and you’ll see that its surface consists of millions of tiny mohair fibres, creating a deep, dense pile that can be brushed and squashed and ruffled about while still springing back and retaining its character.
Our mohair velvet has a 100% mohair pile on a pure cotton backing and weighs a substantial 1,060g per linear metre. There is no polyester in it, no protective back coating and no stain-repellent treatment.
It comes from Angora goats on a family farm in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, where the goats are shorn for their fleece, and the finished fabric is made, via a highly skilled and complicated process, by Belgian velvet specialists Belo.
In other words, it’s the real deal.
But isn't mohair horribly expensive?
Yes indeed. The process of producing it is complex, the raw material is expensive and the finished cloth sits firmly at the luxury end of upholstery.
But most furniture businesses price by percentage margin, so if a fabric costs significantly more, that extra cost gets multiplied on its journey to the customer.
At Schplendid we don’t work that way. Instead, we have a radical approach to pricing: we pass on the extra cost only, with no multiplier. If a fabric costs us £50 more, you pay £50 more, and that’s it.
That principle runs through the way we price all our fabrics and is one of the reasons we can use materials that would normally belong much further up the furniture market.
With mohair, the effect is particularly striking. We’ve found comparable mohair sofas costing nearly six times as much as ours.
Mohair colours, light and swatches
In Rohan’s video above you may be able to see that as he runs his hand across the fabric, areas of it seem to change colour. This isn’t a trick of the camera but one of the lovely peculiarities of mohair.
As with other velvets, the fibres lie in a pile, and the light hits them differently according to their direction and where the light is coming from, as well as your own viewing angle.
This effect is especially dramatic with mohair: brush it one way and then the other and it can move from darker and richer to pale and silvery. Walking around it has a similar, rather magical effect. Basically, a mohair sofa never looks like one completely flat block of colour.
Which is why it’s a very sensible idea to order some mohair swatches and play with them. We recommend putting a swatch where your sofa is going to live, turning it around, looking at it in different lights and brushing the pile in different directions.
The swatch will give you a very good idea of the colour, but mohair responds to its surroundings, and that is something you really want to see before choosing yours.
We have six colours to begin with: Marmalade, a rich burnished orange (below); Nimbus, a light atmospheric blue-grey; Butterbean, a warm creamy off-white; Matcha, a soft muted green; Mole, a deep chocolate brown (above); and Heather, a dusky earthy pink.
The most luxurious thing we could find
Mohair is our most expensive fabric, it took an age to get right, and nobody else is doing anything quite like this at our price point.
But that’s really the whole Schplendid philosophy. Whether it’s eight-way hand-tied springs, goose down, solid beechwood or now mohair, we want to make really exceptional, natural, durable things available to as many people as possible.
Mohair may be the ultimate expression of the Schplendid way.
See also:
Mohair care FAQs Mohair is surprisingly resilient, but it does have a few quirks of its own. We’ve put together a separate guide to caring for mohair, including spills, marks, brushing the pile and what not to do.
The Schplendid pricing model explained To make a truly Schplendid sofa – the most comfortable, long-lasting sofa possible – you need seriously pricey ingredients and craft skills hardly anyone bothers with anymore. Remarkably, we’ve worked out a way to do this without charging silly money.
Why on earth are we making sofas in mohair?
Mohair is one of the most luxurious upholstery fabrics you can buy, and one of the most expensive… which is exactly why we wanted to use it.
There are lovely fabrics, and luxurious fabrics, and then there is mohair.
It comes from the Angora goat and produces an extraordinary velvet: immensely soft, wonderfully lustrous and, despite appearances, remarkably tough and resilient too. Rohan describes sitting on it as being a little like sitting on one of those enormous teddy bears you win at the fair, except it’s made from natural fibres and is much better suited to a sitting room.
Look closely at the fabric and you’ll see that its surface consists of millions of tiny mohair fibres, creating a deep, dense pile that can be brushed and squashed and ruffled about while still springing back and retaining its character.
Our mohair velvet has a 100% mohair pile on a pure cotton backing and weighs a substantial 1,060g per linear metre. There is no polyester in it, no protective back coating and no stain-repellent treatment.
It comes from Angora goats on a family farm in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, where the goats are shorn for their fleece, and the finished fabric is made, via a highly skilled and complicated process, by Belgian velvet specialists Belo.
In other words, it’s the real deal.
But isn't mohair horribly expensive?
Yes indeed. The process of producing it is complex, the raw material is expensive and the finished cloth sits firmly at the luxury end of upholstery.
But most furniture businesses price by percentage margin, so if a fabric costs significantly more, that extra cost gets multiplied on its journey to the customer.
At Schplendid we don’t work that way. Instead, we have a radical approach to pricing: we pass on the extra cost only, with no multiplier. If a fabric costs us £50 more, you pay £50 more, and that’s it.
That principle runs through the way we price all our fabrics and is one of the reasons we can use materials that would normally belong much further up the furniture market.
With mohair, the effect is particularly striking. We’ve found comparable mohair sofas costing nearly six times as much as ours.
Mohair colours, light and swatches
In Rohan’s video above you may be able to see that as he runs his hand across the fabric, areas of it seem to change colour. This isn’t a trick of the camera but one of the lovely peculiarities of mohair.
As with other velvets, the fibres lie in a pile, and the light hits them differently according to their direction and where the light is coming from, as well as your own viewing angle.
This effect is especially dramatic with mohair: brush it one way and then the other and it can move from darker and richer to pale and silvery. Walking around it has a similar, rather magical effect. Basically, a mohair sofa never looks like one completely flat block of colour.
Which is why it’s a very sensible idea to order some mohair swatches and play with them. We recommend putting a swatch where your sofa is going to live, turning it around, looking at it in different lights and brushing the pile in different directions.
The swatch will give you a very good idea of the colour, but mohair responds to its surroundings, and that is something you really want to see before choosing yours.
We have six colours to begin with: Marmalade, a rich burnished orange (below); Nimbus, a light atmospheric blue-grey; Butterbean, a warm creamy off-white; Matcha, a soft muted green; Mole, a deep chocolate brown (above); and Heather, a dusky earthy pink.
The most luxurious thing we could find
Mohair is our most expensive fabric, it took an age to get right, and nobody else is doing anything quite like this at our price point.
But that’s really the whole Schplendid philosophy. Whether it’s eight-way hand-tied springs, goose down, solid beechwood or now mohair, we want to make really exceptional, natural, durable things available to as many people as possible.
Mohair may be the ultimate expression of the Schplendid way.
See also:
Mohair care FAQs
Mohair is surprisingly resilient, but it does have a few quirks of its own. We’ve put together a separate guide to caring for mohair, including spills, marks, brushing the pile and what not to do.
The Schplendid pricing model explained
To make a truly Schplendid sofa – the most comfortable, long-lasting sofa possible – you need seriously pricey ingredients and craft skills hardly anyone bothers with anymore. Remarkably, we’ve worked out a way to do this without charging silly money.