T HE SOCIETY INC

sibella court & the society inc

Sibella Court is a creative director, interior & product designer, television presenter, author & founder of the The Society inc, a design company, online hardware emporium and purveyor of homegoods.

The Society inc was founded in 2008 with curiosity embedded into the DNA. It’s an imaginarium with a product offering that celebrates the romance & nostalgia of history, hand crafted objects & heritage trades. The hardware and homegoods collections are inspired by time worn curiosities from around the globe and are made from materials that patina with age, grace with use & embed people’s stories.

As Sibella’s empire expands, she has added to her offering and partnered with leading manufacturers to design & produce ranges of paint, wallpaper & textiles, tiles, outdoor furniture and upholstered furniture. This all encompassing curation of interior products seeks to inspire & excite, catering to both the DIY home market and the design trade industry.

Sibella’s love of history, particularly the year 1856, & The Royal Society with its ‘experimental gentlemen’ are key in the concept of The Society inc. The mid-1800s were a-changing with the understanding of curbing scurvy, sophisticated new navigation tools & the charting of the tradewinds, leading to a flurry of seafaring exploration from the mid 18th century onwards. The oddities & curiosities, botanicals, animals & bird specimens & other treasures that were carefully transported back began to spark the imaginations of the general public as well as the exciting travel journals of seafaring adventures & far-flung exotic places being published. This was a great time of change, excitement, experiment, discovery and imagination; the world & how it was viewed was in the process of changing forever!

From this time in history also came trades who crafted with resources like metal, timber and canvas. Their age-old approaches of material recovery and resourcefulness have been a guiding light for our sustainability ethos. The farriers, forgers, coppers & shipwrights who relied on steel, brass, durable canvas & bronze for making sails and horseshoes; ship hulls and copper nails inspire our products and have been our best teachers of construction knowledge. They have gifted us with a roadmap in the objects they left behind. No parts wasted, metals were valued, recovered, reheated, reused and reworked. Old objects would be disassembled to be made into something new.

At The Society inc HQ everyone is invited to join, membership is free and you don’t have to be independent wealthy gentlemen. We encourage you to BYO ideas, outlandish as possible please! Delve into our world - it is both real & imagined. We invite you to join the crew and explore our product range to collect some of our magic fairy dust and bring your own spaces to life!