It started, as these things often do, with something we couldn't have.
We were in Great Glen Stoves, a wood-burning stove and outdoor living showroom near Inverness, when we saw them: two wingback chairs dressed in black velvet, with a dark, painterly rose print across the back and wings. Look closely at that print and you find a tiger's eyes watching you through the foliage, and a bird half-hidden among the branches. They weren't the reason we'd gone in. We left thinking about nothing else.
They weren't for sale. They were part of the shop's own furniture, not stock, and no amount of asking changed that. So we did what anyone does when they want something specific and can't have it: we went looking for the same thing somewhere else.
The search that went nowhere
We looked for weeks. Furniture shops, upholsterers, secondhand sites, anywhere a pair of wingback chairs in that fabric might plausibly turn up. They didn't. Chairs, yes — plenty of them, in every shape and price. But not that fabric, and not that particular combination of a classic wingback frame with something so unexpected happening across the back of it. Eventually the search itself told us something: if it didn't exist anywhere else, we would have to build it.
Finding the fabric first
We started with the part that mattered most to us — the print. That led us to Becca Who, a British textile designer whose velvets are printed from her own artwork, and to a design called Bengal Rose Garden — dark, dense roses with a tiger concealed in the leaves. It was, near enough, the exact fabric we'd seen. Ordering it felt like the first real step, even though at that point we still had no chairs to put it on.
A his-and-hers pair, via Facebook Marketplace
The frames came next, and came from an unlikely place — a his-and-hers pair of wingback chairs, found on Facebook Marketplace. Sound rather than stylish, which was exactly what we needed, since the frames were only ever going to be a starting point. Reupholstery is not a skill either of us has, so the last piece was finding someone who could take the frames and the fabric and turn them into the chairs we'd been picturing. That was Kerbi Craft in Inverness, who took on the job.
The waiting, and the landing
Then came the part nobody warns you about: the wait. Reupholstery isn't quick, and there was very little to do but leave it in someone else's capable hands. We used the time to plan the room the chairs would eventually live in — the top landing, a bright, high-ceilinged spot under a vaulted window looking out over the hills. We had a theme to settle on and pieces to find to go with it, and it turned out to be the same problem all over again in miniature: it is genuinely hard to find things for a home that feel considered rather than off-the-shelf. Among the pieces we tracked down for that room was a mirror with a gilded, root-like frame, more sculpture than furniture, which ended up saying as much about the space as the chairs themselves would.
When the chairs finally came back, they went straight up to the landing, either side of the piano, catching the light from that window for most of the day. They've since taken on an unofficial second job as the dog's favourite place to survey the garden.
Why this is the start of Croft & Cleo
We didn't set out to start a business by looking for two chairs. But the frustration of that search — knowing exactly what we wanted, and finding almost nowhere that sold anything like it — is, in hindsight, the reason Croft & Cleo exists. It is the same frustration behind every product we stock: a sense that most of what's available is either mass-produced or overpriced for no good reason, and that there ought to be a place to find things that are genuinely a bit different, chosen with some care rather than simply stocked.
The chairs took months, several strangers' worth of help, and more searching than we'd like to admit. We'd do it again. That is more or less the whole philosophy of the shop, condensed into two armchairs and a very patient upholsterer.