Merion residents Ephraim Paul and Liz Galbraith—the duo behind acclaimed lighting and textile firm Galbraith & Paul—espouse a minimal style that packs maximal punch

Designer Liz Galbraith and her husband and business partner Ephraim Paul spend their days at their Manayunk studio, Galbraith & Paul, making stuff—glorious stuff, stuff that has been featured in magazines like Metropolitan Home, Domino, Better Homes & Gardens, Elle Decor and even on the cover of Filter, (in the home of Wilco front man Jeff Tweedy). So it’s a bit ironic that, when it comes to her own Merion home, Galbraith likes to keep the stuff to a minimum. “I don’t like to have too much stuff in my life,” she says. “I really don’t like clutter. I don’t like to be surrounded by too many things. To keep things minimal, simple and clean, that’s my goal.”

What Galbraith means, the aesthetic she works and lives by, is that she wants to limit her stuff to quality, handmade goods—prints, ceramics and accessories—that reflect the same ethos as the products she herself designs. “The main thing that’s important,” she says, “is really the making.”

Galbraith and Paul first launched their business selling handmade objects for the home back in 1986. Galbraith was a painter fresh out of art school, hungry to create things that were both functional and beautiful, when she stumbled across Isamu Noguchi’s rice-paper lanterns. Inspired, she set off on a month-long journey through Japan’s traditional paper-making villages, to learn how to craft such pieces herself. She and Paul began bringing the lamps to craft shows, and a business was born.

The problem, says Galbraith, is that handmade paper is decidedly temperamental. “It’s almost like wine-making: You’d get a batch of fiber that was grown on a shady hill without much rain, for example, and the paper wouldn’t turn out the same way. There was a lot that was out of my control. So I wanted something that was more immediate, and that turned out to be fabric.”

About 12 years ago, she taught herself how to block print and created their first line of hand-printed pillows and table runners. Those spawned the full line of pendant lamps, fabric by the yard and even hand-tufted rugs. Now, some 14 employees work in the studio, mixing colors and printing more than 25 different patterns on linen, silk and velvet. The result is a stunning marriage of modernist styling and ancient technology. “Everything’s very reduced and simplified,” says Galbraith of the line. “I like to create things that I feel are a bridge between many different styles but don’t really land on any one style. I like the clean lines of Scandinavian design and the hand of Japanese brush drawing or print; I love the quality of Italian Fortuny fabrics, and the palette of Indian block printing. I try to pull things from all different traditions.”

As for the process, they’ve updated it in some ways, but it’s still fairly simple and very painstaking. Working in 18-inch squares, one person might produce anywhere from eight to 20 yards of fabric in a day, which explains why they cost around $160 per yard at designer showrooms across the U.S. and internationally. (The lighting and pillows are sold online at roomandboard.com.) Paul says keeping things handmade is exactly the point: “Hand block printing is a craft that’s thousands of years old, that probably originated in India. It was brought to Europe in the late 1600s, to France and England. William Morris did it in his studio workshop. And we’ve always wanted to have that kind of a workshop feeling, like William Morris, where we’re creating in a studio environment with a community of artisans.”

To that end, employees only come in four days a week. The rest of the time, they’re encouraged to focus on their own art, whether that’s baking (our favorite cookie cutter, Jen Cascarino of Cookies a la Main, works in the back office), woodworking or painting. So when people ask about things like their celebrity clientele, Galbraith brushes them off: “It’s not really where we’re coming from—us and our famous clients. It’s more about promoting the next generation of artists and building this community.”

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