Marina Mill is a family business that specialises in designing and producing exclusive furnishing fabrics.
Following a Fine Art education and several years working with Zika Ascher, Keith Rawkins and his wife, Stephanie, set up business in 1967 to design textiles for the fashion boutiques of Swinging London.
They began by hand-printing fabrics from a basement flat in Fulham and were soon supplying many famed fashion couturiers of the day.
A few specially designed commissions for private residences and boutique hotels in the mid-1970s gradually changed the focus from fashion to interiors.
Keith and Steph were joined by their son, Guy, and their daughter, Tandine, in the late 1980s, by which time we were developing our own ranges of exclusive hand-printed furnishing fabrics.
Bespoke commission work continued, with requests to print customers’ own designs for companies such as Colefax & Fowler and English Heritage, thus beginning a fruitful yet discreet route of hand-printing of historical replications for very high profile clients.
Marina Mill relocated to the current premises in the early 1990s, an old Victorian mill on the banks of the River Medway in Kent, England. This move coincided with lucrative projects to design and produce fine interior fabrics for production motoryachts and thereafter to the most prestigious Superyachts.
This involvement in elite yacht projects led to the development of EXTEX, our award-winning range of luxury outdoor fabrics.
We have been creating bespoke textiles for nearly 50 years and thus have a vast archive of print designs available. Hundreds of designs exist on screen, stored in our onsite Victorian sheds, along with thousands of sketches, drawings and finished ideas on the shelves of our extensive library.
Using all these sources, we regularly collaborate with our clients on their projects, to produce precisely the right fabric for their collection or scheme.
All our fabrics are conceived, designed and hand drawn by us in our studio at the Mill. We produce every stage of the design process from the sketch to the draft film to the final colouration.
Our studio cupboards are full of our printed samples on various fine basecloths, offered as inspiration and examples of our finely executed design work and highest quality hand-printing.