Toronto’s Studio La Beauté custom textile work stands out in a sea of mass-produced decor | Canada Voices

Most of us give little thought to where our window coverings come from. We choose curtains from an online catalogue or machine-made panels from a retailer, looking for something attractive, affordable and readily available.

At Studio La Beauté in Toronto, curtains are made very differently.

In the middle of the workshop are two large sewing tables, surrounded by bolts of fabric, spools of thread and drawers overflowing with samples. Tassels, appliqués, ribbons, beads and bits of embroidery are everywhere.

Here, curtains are couture: Sketches are drawn, pleats are measured, rosettes are shaped by hand and linings are handstitched into place.

Presiding over it all is Camal Pirbhai, the studio’s owner and creative director, who trained in bespoke curtain making in Europe more than three decades ago. Alongside him are four women, ranging in age from 23 to 63, whose skills include beadwork, patchwork, painting on silk and padded stitching, called trapunto, a traditional Italian quilting technique dating back to the 13^th century.

Together, they make curtains, cushions, blankets, bespoke chandeliers (one is made of thousands of pieces of chartreuse string), headboards, chair backs and wall coverings.

“I like to think that our work bridges artistry and craftsmanship,” says Pirbhai, a multidisciplinary artist whose work with artist Camille Turner has been exhibited internationally and at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The kind of work he and his small team do is also increasingly rare.

Pirbhai says the knowledge required to make such beautiful things is disappearing, overtaken by machine-made mass production and a culture used to getting things quickly and cheaply.

Interior designers, too, bear some responsibility, he says. They may spend hours selecting an expensive fabric, then give little thought to how it is cut, stitched, pleated and hung.

“The last decade I’ve been pounding the table, saying to designers, ‘Please don’t just mail it in. Let’s have a little discussion.’

“What disappears when a craft dies is not simply a way of making an object, but the knowledge accumulated and passed from one pair of hands to another.”

For centuries, textiles for the home were both necessities and creative expressions. Before mechanized production, curtains, cushions, quilts and tapestries were cut, sewn and embellished by hand, using skills passed between generations and across cultures. Beautifully made curtains, for example, would often remain in a family home for decades.

Today, computer-aided machines can reproduce elaborate patterns and embroidery quickly and inexpensively, while many consumers furnish homes with affordable pieces they don’t expect to keep for a lifetime.

Most of Studio La Beauté’s commissions require hours of labour. Pirbhai designs the hardware, too, commissioning carpenters, metalworkers and glass blowers to fabricate rods, brackets and finials.

His career began at 19. After leaving a fine-arts program in Toronto, Pirbhai moved to London, England, where he apprenticed with a custom curtain maker. Soon after, he returned home, where there was a scarcity of bespoke curtain makers.

He built Studio La Beauté slowly, through word of mouth. Today his soft furnishings can be found in the homes of Toronto’s toniest neighbourhoods, as well as in New York, London and Europe.

Toronto interior designer Colette van den Thillart, who discovered Pirbhai during COVID-19, understands his frustration.

She spent 13 years working in Britain with celebrity designer Nicky Haslam and holds a master’s degree in decorative arts. History informs her interiors, and she sees curtains as part of the architecture and narrative of a room, not simply a covering for a window.

“There really aren’t a lot of people who do what he does in North America,” she says. “There also just isn’t the demand for this any more, except from a few of us.”

Van den Thillart believes a culture focused on convenience and resale has contributed to the lack of interest. Realtors advise homeowners not to personalize too much, she says. “Everywhere people are living their lives in these boxes, painted white with furniture from Restoration Hardware, designed for resale,” she says. “I find it utterly depressing.”

For the past six years she has been bringing much of her custom drapery work to Studio La Beauté, spending hours at the work tables with Pirbhai and his team, exchanging ideas.

“Curtain making is like dressmaking,” she says. “You can think it’s just a curtain, or it’s just a blazer. If that’s the case, why do they have Savile Row? It’s the way you cut, how you hem, how you do the beautiful edge details.”

A current commission makes her point.

For a client’s country house in Ireland, van den Thillart and Pirbhai are creating a café curtain for a bathroom overlooking the garden. It could easily have been ordered online. Instead, it will be hand-stitched with wildflowers, a reflection of the ones the homeowner can see outside her window.

“When she sits in her tub, I want her to have a Proustian moment,” van den Thillart says. “The café curtain is going to look like a specimen vase of what she loves most growing on her property.”

The survival of such carefully considered work depends on finding new artisans to carry it forward, van den Thillart says.

Memengwaans Isaac-Sands, 31, has worked at Studio La Beauté for a decade. She studied visual and creative arts at Sheridan College and fashion at George Brown College before hearing about a curtain maker named Camal who valued a skill she had grown up with. Isaac-Sands is Ojibwa, and beadwork has been passed down through generations of her family.

“It was just something I knew how to do,” she says. “It wasn’t until I started studying and working in the city that I realized how rare it is. It means so much that the work I do here is valued.”

Ultimately, that is what Pirbhai is asking for, too. Not a return to a world in which every curtain is sewn by hand, but an appreciation of what is lost when speed, price and convenience become the primary measures of value.

There is an appetite among discerning customers for things made by human beings, with the tiny irregularities that go along with them.

Pirbhai says a machine can reproduce a pattern faster and more precisely. “What it can’t do is possess the accumulated knowledge and judgment of a craftsperson who knows, through doing, how a fabric should fall, where a stitch should sit, when an embellishment is enough and when it is too much.

“That knowledge survives only when it is used,” he says. “Someone has to teach it. Someone has to learn it. And someone has to believe the difference is worth paying for.”