With over 50 years experience, we have all the skills to transform your space with beautiful, bespoke soft furnishings.
Peta Shepherd
Project Manager
Snowie Modaberri
Head Seamstress and Curtain Maker
Sophie McKinnon
Head Seamstress and Curtain Maker
Sheena Delpiccolo
Seamstress and Curtain Maker
Jo and Graham Smith
Founder and Fitter
Martin Boxall
Fitter
We collaborate with various designers and craftspeople, including:
FAQs
Who do you work with?
Designers, hotels, and individual clients looking to replace soft furnishing.
What do Jo Howell Designs make?
Bespoke, handmade soft furnishings (curtains, blinds, cushions, headboards, bed vallences, special requests). We also do up-cycling projects! Through our wonderful connections, we can supply curtain poles, upholstery, privacy blinds, roller blinds, blackout blinds, and shutters.
What don’t they make?
We don’t make machine-made curtains. We are a team of skilled and experienced soft furnishing designers and hand-crafts people.
Where do you work?
We are always open to working in places outside of these locations, but some common spots for Jo Howell Designs are south and south west England. We have also worked in Ireland, France, Switzerland, Italy, etc. We can send your project by your preferred delivery method.
The history of Jo Howell Designs
At the age of 34, Jo was newly divorced and living in London, already silver-haired but rocking the look, and on the search for work.
The Job Centre told her if she had any hope of finding a secretarial job she needed to dye her hair and lie about her age. To which she thought, “Oh, no thank you. I’m not faking anything,” and she set her creative mind to work.
After some time sewing for The Ski Shop in Notting Hill Gate, altering salopettes and sportswear, she was recommended to other Londoners for a variety of sewing projects and would soon meet P M Dyson, a feisty London-based interior designer.
Dyson was a source of direction and encouragement in Jo’s early career. As one of the few designers that actually knew how to make curtains, she somewhat guided Jo over 15 years working together.
Jo quickly gained a reputation with a needle and thread, leaving secretarial work was safely in the past and Jo breathing a sigh of relief.
Many barriers lay ahead (sexist comments when buying her first drill on Ken High Street, local builders patronising her about whether she could handle the tools in her bag, and the usual freelancer fears of when the next job will come in), but she had made it.
“Not having to depend on anyone else financially was a real highlight. Jo Howell Designs just took on a life of its own – I remember sitting on a Friday night and thinking, I don’t know what I’m going to do on Monday. Then Monday morning would come, the phone would ring, and off I’d go.”
Jo’s family joined the trade and continues to be the beating heart of the business, which grows and grows on reputation and recommendation alone.
Jo’s legacy is a stream of wedding and bridesmaids dresses for prestigious politicians, of course an endless list of outstanding homes, plus the odd restoration projects for soon-to-be-lost upholstery, quilts and crewelwork (a Jacobean form of embroidery), which she said is “Painstaking but amazing work.”
For the past ten years, Jo’s daughters have been running the business, with Peta navigating projects and designer collaborations, and Snowie and Sophie creating their bespoke masterpieces.
