Maharani pillow cases from John Robshaw textiles are hand-printed and hand-embroidered in India.

More than any part of the house, the bedroom should convey luxurious comfort, receiving you like a guest in a hotel—clean, cozy, with bursts of color at the right places. As the most intimate of spaces, it must conjure notions of love and lovemaking, and of course, restful sleep. The easiest (and possibly the cheapest) way to do this is by dressing your bed in the most eye-catching patterns and the softest of sheets (the higher the thread count, the better). Even if your bed is not as ornate as the maharaja’s, you can still make it feel opulent with beddings, duvets, pillows and pillow cases hand-crafted by artisans who still use traditional methods of printing.

John Robshaw has been bringing these beautiful textiles to the world under his eponymous company. Focus Global, home to some of the most exclusive names in home furnishing and equipment, has decided that it’s about time for Filipinos to partake in this rich, mainly Asian-inspired prints by offering the latest collections from John Robshaw Textiles.

“I hope the collection will do well in Manila,” he says through an email interview. “All of the Filipinos I know travel like mad and are very cosmopolitan so I think this line is an excellent fit.”

The exquisite prints are achieved through woodblock method which starts with the woodblock being dipped to wet clay and eventually touched to the fabric. As soon as the clay is dry, the cloth is then dipped into an indigo vat: the intensity of the color depends on the number of dips. The fabric then is allowed to dry under the sun which will then be washed off of its clay. “I was completely fascinated by the dyeing and printing processes, as well as how the finished product is used,” he says. “Textiles become intimate companions in daily life, whether as a pillow, bedcover or sarong.”

John updates the prints and adds his artistic imprint on them by combining the motifs of different cultures, finding out the designs that look good together and looking for solutions that will make them relevant to urban dwellers.

“I want all the colors, processes and designs from each culture to blend,” he explains. “I redesign them and mix up the processes in ways no one has ever done before. I try to edit them, learn from them, make them my own but retain their essence.

In piggybacking these designs and techniques with each other or with my own ideas, what emerges is new and fresh, and yet retains that sense of tradition, of the handmade.”

Each year, John comes up with two collections, a Herculean task considering that each collection features anywhere from 40 to 50 new prints. His workshops are based in India where he is currently right now, supervising production. “We directly or indirectly employ a few hundred artisans and we pay excellent wages to retain the skilled printers,” he says.

“By investing in artisan printing we keep the skills alive and flourishing with new innovations. It works out for my company as well as the artisan communities which might be lost working with large retailers.

“By producing my textiles abroad,” he adds, “I get to become a minor character in the lives of the people I work with, and I can take inspiration from what I see and do there. I go to their weddings, celebrate their festivals, I get sick with them, I develop relationships with the people who are teaching me. When you look at my textiles, it’s like you’ve been on the world tour along with me.”

The alumnus of the Pratt Institute of Design is proud of the fact that their textiles, being hand-made, are friendly to the environment. Unlike other methods, say screen printing, block printing utilizes all pigments, which means that there is hardly any residue that will have to be thrown in sewers and waterways. Left-over fabrics are not thrown away but are instead turned into other products such as bags, dog beds, journals, and other products.

John doesn’t intend to mass produce their collections, adding that what keeps him going are the 16-hour flights to India, working with the artisans and discovering new workshops that exhibit age-old techniques.

A citizen of the world, John still exhibits the fascination he initially had when he went to his first Asian country, China, and fell in love with the long tradition of fabric-making.

“Landing in a new country, bumping around in a dodgy taxi looking for an elusive weaver and discovering some incredible textile that is still being made that we can introduce to the world” constitute his notion of happiness.