Décors Barbares Shopify Website
What We Did
Patterned to perfection.
Décors Barbares is the textile design studio of Nathalie Farman-Farma, known for richly detailed fabrics inspired by folklore, history, and storytelling. Her collections are beloved by collectors and interior designers alike and crafted using traditional methods and archival references. With a book, showroom presence, and an international reputation, Décors Barbares needed a digital home that could match the intricacy and artistry of the fabrics themselves.
Project Goals
This project called for more than just a beautiful site. Nathalie wanted a platform that could share her story and philosophy with depth and artistry while presenting her entire fabric collection in a way that mirrored the quality and story behind her fabrics themselves. It was important to make it easy for designers and clients to navigate a library of highly detailed, complex textiles. Plus, we wanted to make sure to bridge her visual universe — book, fabrics, studio — into one cohesive digital experience, while also leaving room for buyable products in the future. For the Julia Balfour team, the challenge was clear: build a Shopify site with the sophistication and usability of a custom platform.
A fabric house, reimagined online
Design
A main goal of this project was to translate Décors Barbares’ existence in the fabric and literary worlds online. Using a custom Décors font and illustrations reminiscent of those found in her illustrative book, rich reds, blacks, and golds that embody Nathalie herself are layered into the Shopify site to make her fairytale and folkloric textiles shine.
Large photography of Nathalie’s personal interiors cover the site, making users feel like they have entered into the Nathalie-designed rooms themselves, giving them a glimpse of her fabrics at work. Intricate fabric listings and pages pull you into Décors Barbares’ textile world, allowing us to absorb every little detail. Every element was designed to echo the qualities of the fabrics themselves: intricate, intentional, and timeless.
Crafting complexity into clarity
Fabric Filtering
Unlike standard Shopify retail sites, Décors Barbares required advanced fabric filters that allow users to sort through designs by color, motif, and collection with ease. These filters were custom-developed to handle the intricacy of Nathalie’s catalog, where fabrics are as nuanced as the stories behind them.
Fabric detail pages were designed to be as complete as possible, pulling in specifications and context that had previously only existed in downloadable PDFs. These pages set a new bar for textile cataloging, providing both depth and usability. The result is a digital archive that is as functional as it is beautiful, designed to support Décors Barbares’ reputation for exceptional, one-of-a-kind fabrics.
Story first, then structure
Content Strategy
Competitive research across the luxury textile and design world helped shape the content decisions that make this site feel as considered as the fabrics themselves. The About page was given space to tell two separate stories — the woman behind the work and the world she built around it — so that visitors can find both the person and the philosophy in their own time.
The site was also thoughtfully organized around two different kinds of visitors: designers looking for guidance on how to bring these fabrics into their work, and individuals drawn in by the artistry and wanting to understand how to access it. And where a simple store link once lived, a dedicated book page now opens up Nathalie’s visual world — less a point of purchase, more an invitation to wander.
