I want a Morrow Soft Goods bedroom
Talking to co-founder Stephanie Cleary about MSG's latest collection
It’s just the first week of June and we’ve already made it to the monthslong stretch of “it’s too humid to live in this city” that is New York summer. For coziness reasons, I’ve been trying to make my duvet work, but after last night I admitted to myself that it’s time to make my transition to summer bedding. For me, that means packing away my duvet and its brown sateen cover from Morrow Soft Goods and bringing out the honey-colored coverlet (also from Morrow, but no longer for sale) that brightens my room as I kvetch about New York humidity some more.
Morrow Soft Goods has been my favorite bedding brand for years, a spot that was cemented when I wrote a home tour on co-founder and creative director Stephanie Cleary’s Highland Park house for AD four years ago. I’ve always been into wackier colors for my living spaces, but Cleary’s desert-toned space made me crave a bedroom set up that felt slightly more organic than the rest of my Highland Park home (with rooms painted in blue and pink and red) leaned. Though the company’s pieces aren’t exclusively in earth tones, the colors they work with all feel quite grounded.
When I left that house and came back to New York, I decided to keep my bedroom a space that wasn’t quite so color crazy. I painted the walls in Backdrop’s “Mood Lighting”—a juicy beige tone that has a yellowish glow when the light streams in during the daytime, but really does feel like mood lighting at night when illuminated only by my bedside lamp. I picked out a wood dresser, kept the wood platform bed I already had, grabbed the aforementioned waffle weave Morrow Soft Goods coverlet and added some earth-toned throw pillows from the company too. Best of all, I’ve been extremely satisfied with how every piece has held up after years of use.
What really makes the space work for my stimulation-craving brain, despite its more subdued color palette, is the company’s thoughtful approach to texture. After getting to know both Cleary and co-founder Michelle Toney over the years, it’s clear this is no afterthought. From taking sustainability concerns into consideration in an authentic way to always testing out new weave patterns, it’s clear that these details are taken quite seriously at Morrow. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that the pieces look as lovely as you want time spent in bed to feel.
Morrow recently launched their latest collection, which includes their first pieces made with a cotton hemp blend, a delightful new embroidered coverlet, their first shower curtain and first made to order rug, and so much more. (As much as I’ve been loving my calm bedroom setup, the green and brown Yara pattern pieces are really calling my name and as a blue obsessive I’m loving the Oceana color…) To hear more about what inspired the pieces, I sat down with Cleary to discuss.
What were your main priorities with this collection?
I would definitely say this is probably the most exciting collection we've ever had, for me personally. It was the first time we just focused on what we really wanted to do. So I feel like this has been years in the making but there's so much more texture. There's way more pops of color, like I'm staring at the Yara, which is a beautiful blanket and available on a bolster pillow and other pieces. It has a whole bunch of different textures of different heights and different patterns. It has a really unexpected green—it's like a kelly green with a little bit of blue in it. It's a collection really focused on different types of weaves and how to make it a little bit more modern with color.
What led you to hemp?
It was two different things. I think a lot of people were using linen at the time, and then the price had skyrocketed. So we talked to our factory, like, "why is it so expensive all of a sudden?" They were saying it had one season to grow and that was a really bad year for it. We were like, "Wait a minute. What?" We thought that it was the most sustainable crop. We kept looking more and more into it, and we still believe in linen, but then that's when we learned about hemp.
We had already seen hemp for years, but the technology wasn't there, of how to spin it, how to weave it, and then when we saw this perfect blend of hemp and a little bit of cotton, it felt more like linen. Then we learned that it's seasonless. It can grow all throughout the year. It actually replenishes and rejuvenates the soil. For us, it makes it the most perfect, magical crop. There isn't like, "Oh, we hit a bad year. It's not going to happen." You don't have to worry about crop rotation and it has a lot of similarities to linen, like it doesn't use pesticides and things like that, because they're actually really both hearty. We know we're a product company, we are going to generate waste. We just want to be better. I think that's a big thing for us, we are always asking our factories all these hard questions. I think we both really push each other, which is great.
How much do you think about how new pieces you introduce into the collection will pair with old pieces you've released for returning customers who are pairing old pieces with new ones?
I think that we always try and think about what we did in the last season or even two seasons ago. A lot of it's seasonless and very core, I want to say. Even right now in our studio, we have all the new stuff [set up] and I'm slowly integrating some of the older stuff that we have with it. Just to make sure that it all does blend together, but everything is supposed to all be able to be layered. With this new collection, we just wanted a few more things to pop but in a weird way, also clash. Right now we have on the bed [in the studio] the plaid on top of stripes, on top of stripes, with more stripes. We make sure that all the colors go together, but then we also want things to be a little off, if you like it that way, you know. It all depends on how you style the pieces, but they're all supposed to be built upon each other.
Are there any pieces from this collection that, as you've tested them out in your own space, that you've been particularly excited about?
The Laurel Stripe we have in a whole bunch of products, but I think I'm really excited about it, because I'm not a matchy-matchy person, and I have it at home as the sheets and the duvet cover. That to me is one of my favorite pieces because there's so many different shades of green and yellow and you look at it from far away and it looks like it's just a green stripe. But then when you look up close and you can see all the different layers and all the different colors of it. We had to weave it in a totally different way. That's probably my favorite, as well as the Yara. Both of those are my babies.
The Marta is my favorite piece in general. I just drew a whole bunch of flowers, scanned them in, printed them out, then cut them and like re-put them together. That probably took us over two years of development, before we even got to produce, so it's just been a really, really long journey, but she's beautiful.
I was wondering about that piece because the embroidery feels like a new direction for you.
This whole season, I just really wanted an old world aesthetic and all traditional things. All of our stuff comes from Portugal and we go to Portugal once a year. We're running around and I'm always looking for embroideries there, and I was like, "wait a minute, what are we doing?" It just felt like the next step for us. We've experienced so much with patterns and colors and we're really excited about this embroidery, we have another embroidery coming up. It just felt natural and it feels like we’re doing it in our own way.