The Guild: Paul Freeman

More than 40 years ago, Paul Freeman was an antiques dealer specializing in textiles and exhibiting at such venues as the Brimfield (Mass.) Antiques Market. As he traveled throughout the Northeast U.S. and Europe, he built an extensive archive of woven and printed designs. He founded Archive Edition in 2000 to focus on fine, woven reproductions of Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco designs.

As the years went on, jacquard mills consolidated or folded; then supply chains were disrupted. Freeman found it difficult to reproduce woven textiles. So, in 2021, he digitized his archive and rebranded the company Textile Artifacts, bringing in his kids Jordan and Marley. They’ve created a line of prints, available on high-quality linen and cotton (or blends when the process indicates).

Printed on demand, yardage is made with high-quality, colorfast inks. Sheers, lightweight fabrics, and heavyweight upholstery fabrics are offered. One of the first reproductions is ‘Zipper’, an abstract pattern printed in purple on a heavyweight cotton canvas, which has been used for tea towels, aprons, cushion covers, and Roman window blinds. 

A popular pattern is ‘ThornRose Flower’. An Arts & Crafts design of the 1920s, it features a stylized grid of roses climbing a garden wall, printed in terra cotta or fuchsia using UV-resistant pigment ink on medium-weight, unbleached, natural linen for such soft furnishings as cushions and lampshades. Corresponding pattern ‘ThornRose Earth’ is in muted tones of olive and terra cotta or fuchsia.

Freeman also maintains a large inventory of antique raw fabric, drapery, bedcoverings, lace, tapestries, etc., for sale (and often rented to film companies). The archive includes very early textiles as well as Victorian, Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco, postwar, and mid-century patterns. More on Instagram at Textile_Artifacts_LA and Textile_Paul.