So hello again world, we’ve been a little quiet on Stairs and Stripes recently. This is mainly due to two reasons, finalising this years new flooring collection (alongside our upcoming new upholstery and accessory fabrics) and our obsession with Monochrome – the quest to get the new black and white designs to sit ‘just right’.

As all familiar with this blog will know, Monochrome is a key passion for us here at Roger Oates.  We have spent many long hours developing that elusive minimal black and white stripe. Perhaps because when working on a new runner design a Monochrome reduces our colour palette in a way that puts all the emphasis on the design itself.

We spend a lot of time developing new colours. Trying to keep tabs on our ‘standard’ pallet is a continual challenge and our desks are permanently littered with dye submits and swatches of various bits of coloured fluff we are interested in.

When it comes to black and white there are no exceptions, our palette contains numerous shades from brilliant paper-whites through to natural whites in every dyeable hue as well as a full palette of soft greys.  No less is the case when it come to black, currently we have three different ones in our ‘standard’ palette. Well shouldn’t everyone?

Now, it’s not that the stripe design itself is less important on a brightly coloured design, just that in a Monochrome it sometimes feels like we have made it more difficult by denying ourselves access to our vast array of colours.

As always we have been through so many different versions of the new designs, each time refining and paring down both design and colour towards our target of simple balanced sophisticated perfection. Sounds easy right?  For this upcoming collection we have trialled more black and white options than any other colour-way, and yes the final swatches we have in the studio now contain unofficially named colours such as “New Black”, “2014 Pale grey” and “New Charcoal”. The dyers have been busy recently.

Thankfully we are almost there. The end of the process feels simultaneously impossible and exhilarating that we have narrowed it down to what seems to be such a small handful of final* candidates.  Each one just right, and sitting well within the collection

Watch this space for the autumn launch of the new collection.  Refined, balanced and sophisticated, possibly including several new Monochrome designs.

* we will inevitably continue to tweak these until the day the production department demand the final technical information from us. But that’s how we work, and that’s what it takes.