Timorous Beasties is opening in the New Town

A new design studio is to open on 18 July on the most expensive residential street in the capital.

The shop will be situated on the corner of Dundas Street and Northumberland Street, showing off the award-winning wallpapers and fabrics that are typical of the irreverent Timorous Beasties.

The showroom will have 2,500 square feet of display space over two floors, housing the company’s entire collection of more than 500 designs. As well as wallpapers and fabrics the store will also sell home accessories and smaller gift items.

In the Edinburgh shop there will be a number of special displays taking visitors on a journey of discovery with the brand which takes its name from the Burns poem.

The fantastical world of Timorous Beasties – where plants, animals and society are visually inextricable, often subversive, sometimes unsettling and always beautiful – has straddled the stratospheres of cool highbrow, civic culture and mass commercial appeal with remarkable success since Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons founded the studio in Glasgow in 1990. Now, widely recognised as the nation’s foremost design tastemakers, the new Timorous Beasties showroom in Edinburgh will join the brand’s existing Glasgow and London stores to create a retail trilogy.

Alistair McAuley, Co-Founder of Timorous Beasties said: “We are delighted to be opening this new showroom in Edinburgh, our second retail space in Scotland, and the home city of many of our loyal and longstanding customers.

“This destination two-storey space on Northumberland Street, in the vibrant and creative heart of the capital’s New Town neighbourhood, will allow us to showcase the full depth and breadth of Timorous Beasties’ collections. In addition to selecting our unique products for home interiors, and receiving personalised one-to-one design and colour advice from our expert and passionate team, we hope our customers will enjoy the experience the new showroom will offer. With over 30 years of Timorous Beasties’ pattern and print heritage on display, this is a wonderful and timely opportunity for the public to view the studio’s body of work in its entirety for the first time, and have the opportunity to purchase their favourite Timorous Beasties designs.”

Timorous Beasties prints are held in collections at the Art Institute of Chicago, Cooper Hewitt Museum, NY, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, and the V&A Museum in London.