Cameron Short and Janet Tristram’s school of block

Walk across the threshold of Bonfield Block-Printers – under a handpainted sign that depicts a plough on earth and a plough in the heavens – and it could be a secret passage to a bygone time. Here, raven-haired, freckle-faced Janet Tristram is sewing a button onto a hand-tailored tweed Poacher’s Coat lined with block-printed fabric depicting hares, eels and pheasants. A wood-burning fire (there is no central heating) warms the room with its long kitchen table, piano and blue-grey flagstone floor. 

At Bonfield, which is located in the tiny Dorset village of Thorncombe, about 10 miles from Lyme Regis, owners Cameron Short and New Zealand-born Tristram, along with their three children, have carved out a very different way of life to the money-power-glamour levers of 21st-century aspiration. Instead, the artist-maker duo ply their imagination and creative skills to create story-rich, hand-carved block prints, wallpaper and textiles that capture the myth, rituals and history of country lore. 

“I’ve always been interested in stories and belief systems, and have done a lot of reading. It’s a lore that is no longer talked about or known, and is somewhat discarded, but it is all part of the human story. I believe it is good to shine a light on it again and, as an artist, it is a rich seam,” says Short, a former art director and copywriter for blue-chip London advertising agencies. Tristram chips in: “As long as that storytelling is authentic and not just borrowing to beef up the mien,” she says of their hands-on, “intensely felt” practice that sidesteps olde worlde clichés with twists aplenty. 

While both were leading vibrant lives in London (they met in Berwick Street’s Bar du Marché), overwork burnout was hitting Short hard. Tristram was sympathetic. “Being a New Zealander, perhaps, and not working in a high-pressure world, I was up for relocating but had to instigate the decision,” she says of their move in 2012 to this rural corner of England with their baby daughter, Ethel. 

The couple landed in a rented cottage on a farm without a regular income or jobs but with a mission to explore the craft of block printing. “On reading a feature on the craft’s doyenne, Marthe Armitage, I found myself fascinated and started whittling away on lino boards in my flat in Whitechapel,” says Short of his early forays into the art that Armitage took to new expressive levels in the 1960s. 

Tristram, who trained in art (with a major in printmaking), followed by a course in fashion design, was increasingly inspired by the landscape, flora and fauna around them. They bought a hand-cranked press and started creating wallpaper, with Short doing farm labouring jobs to keep them afloat. “Printing a 10m roll took a day and two people. We had to register each block, as the print would be ruined if misaligned, and would have to go out for a day while it dried and cured!” Short applied for and won an award from QEST, which involved visiting and learning skills from Marthe Armitage – and further spurred them on.   

The locals were welcoming but wary. “I remember our landlady and her daughter in their flat caps and tweed coats tied up with string, eyeing me up and down. I was wearing my Vivienne Westwood shoes. She remarked, ‘Won’t last a Marshwood winter!’ – and she became my nemesis as I so wanted to prove her wrong!” laughs Tristram. A growing family (they now have three girls: Ethel, Zola and Nell) and an urge to get the business moving propelled the couple to put down proper roots. In 2013, they bought a derelict, Grade II-listed building and outhouses at auction in the village of Thorncombe. 

A tour of the gentle, creaky, sprawling home and workshop with its restored shop frontage reveals how much work and thought they’ve invested into years of restoration. Unusually wide, wax-oiled timber boards adorn the floors and the walls are painted in hues of buttermilk and sage. The eye is drawn to naive oil paintings and 18th-century political prints in this poetic, timewarp house and workspace that cocoons its owners – as it did the many generations that came before them. 

“It was full of 50 years of junk. There was concrete on the floors, oil spillage, fire damage and you could not see out of the windows. The wiring and plumbing were shot. There were vehicles reversed into barns and a caravan,” smiles Short, recalling the arduous do-up project funded by the sale of his London flat. With the help of local carpenters Nick Simco and Jacob Habron, stonemason Gary Balman and his father Tony Short (a builder who specialised in historical homes), and 12 months of hard graft, Bonfield started to take shape. The property revealed its own eccentricities, including a secret staircase and trapdoor, names graffitied on old plaster walls, and what is believed to be a “coffin hatch” in what is now Tristram’s sewing room. Reclaimed timber, ironmongery and furnishings were sourced near and far. “I love old patina. We wanted minimal intervention and our date nights were spent at reclamation yards, with Cameron also trawling the internet for curios like Holy Lord hinges,” Tristram says of the giant H-shaped hand-forged fixing now adorning a wellie cupboard.  

In the process, through Short’s knowledge of the countryside, along with reading and research, the couple unearthed tales of West Country life in all its colour and tragic hardship that fed into motifs and panoramas in Bonfield’s growing library. Designs such as Azook! (meaning “all together”), which features Cornish rowers crossing choppy waters, or Shades of the Countryside, with silhouettes of country folk in the style of Regency miniatures, reverse past social hierarchies. Bloodlines, designed by Tristram, depicts peasants tilling a field alongside caricatures of ladies and gents who converse in speech bubbles with words plucked from William Barnes, the 19th-century poet. Both partners draw artworks that are gouged into the blocks with carving tools. 

Over time, the line has expanded from wallpapers, framed prints and furnishing fabrics (on hand-printed linen) to characterful block-printed garments and satchels of plant-dyed antique hemp hanging from upcycled saddlery leather straps. The crumpled Japanese wool-linen or Harris Tweed coats (from £1,440) with their distinctive small-shouldered, long-skirted silhouette have garnered a cult following. 

One such follower is actor Miranda Richardson. “I first came across Bonfield in a beautifully curated store called The Merchant’s Table in Woodbridge, Suffolk. I ordered a Poacher’s Coat and there began a discussion with the makers so unusual in these days of instant gratification – the process was delightful in every detail,” she says. “The combination of texture, humour and the trompe l’oeil design ‘hanging’ with game honours old traditions… For Janet and Cameron, God really is in the details. I wear it wrapped, belted or open, and as soon as anyone spies it, there’s a question asked and a story to be told.”

The Poacher’s Coat is a tribute to the rural antihero and features printed patches of a pheasant, eel and hare fastened to the lining with tiny button tethers (from £1,440). “Our local poacher brought me a pheasant and I was just transfixed by the beauty of the bird,” says Tristram, who whipped out her pencils to draw a portrait. Meanwhile, a made-to-order design, the Somerset Song Coat, was created for Make Hauser & Wirth (part of Hauser & Wirth gallery in Somerset), featuring motifs based on the lyrics of historic songs collected by archivist Cecil J Sharp.  

The Lost Bags, a selection of one-off handmade bags, from £1,560, are printed with motifs of four objects – a clay pipe (found in their own garden), a whalebone comb, a thimble and a talisman – with imaginary tales of their former owners typed on an old typewriter, and pinned to the inside of the bag. Upcoming is the ribbon-tied Culpeper Coat lined with prints of medicinal plants placed by the appropriate muscle or organ. A Cambridge don and an Austrian criminal psychologist are among the eclectic group of worldwide collectors. 

Chris Salt is chair of the London financial PR firm Headland Consultancy. “My wife gifted me a Lost Bags series bag in beautifully printed vintage linen with the rebus that reads ‘Fear Not My Son’,” he says. “Then I commissioned a Poacher’s Coat, which comes down to my ankles. Wrapped in these glorious pieces you feel involved in a story and connected to an elemental, rural sentiment. There’s a generosity in the way they make things and I admire how they capture the stories, the earthiness and emotions of the countryside.”

Increased demand means the duo now outsource to local seamstresses, fabric dyers, upholsterers (for the wingback chairs) and soft-furnishing makers. “That sense of collaboration, the fusion of skills and the love these people have for what they do is imbued in every object,” says Short, who has found specialists in outlying towns and villages. “That’s the beauty of staying small, everything can remain connected,” adds Tristram. No slouches, the pair have recently completed the restoration of an outlying hovel into a two-bedroom cottage, complete with box beds, walls limewashed in sienna and umber, and a pair of Georgian wingback chairs (designed to protect from draughts) that are bursting out their horsehair innards and awaiting restoration. The dwelling can be a gallery space, residence or anything in between. 

“Early on, a friend cautioned us not to fall into the trap of being ‘happy fools’,” explains Tristram of the risk of working yourself into the ground to pursue a romantic idyll. Yet Bonfield is thriving, driven by the land and the artistry of the hand and block itself.