Made in the Shade

Helen Rutledge has always been fascinated with textiles. “Some people like shopping,” she says. “I love looking at textiles. To me, it’s just art.”

In her home goods and antiques store, she had materials of every color and pattern from all over the world—African Kuba cloth, Indian textiles, and saris—but it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that she decided to use them to make lampshades. At the time, Rutledge was also battling health challenges, and a whirlwind of changes in the retail and antiques industries motivated her to rethink her business and life goals. Following an operation, she recalls, “I thought that [making lampshades] was something that I could do while I was recovering.”

Upon finalizing her designs, she leveraged her connections in the antiques industry to secure a booth at the world’s largest home furnishings trade show, High Point Market in North Carolina. It wasn’t long after that she hired her first seamstress, and her business was launched. 

From the start, it was clear there was a market for the product. “I think the lampshade is the new pillow. People wouldn’t have thought about buying pillows and spending $200 ten years ago, but now everybody’s a convert,” she says. “The same thing is happening with lampshades.”

While selling lamps at her antiques store, lampshades were a constant pain point: “I had all these antique lamps, and by the time I got the lampshade, it was either broken, or it was brown and didn’t really go with the lamp.” 

Now, Rutledge’s store, Bibelot Home, has become a go-to source for custom, hand-stitched lampshades made from a diverse range of materials, including mud cloth and even wallpaper. While the retailer serves all types of customers, they are particularly popular among interior designers, who often place large orders for a single project, including shades for chandeliers, floor lamps, and sconces. “Even if it’s not going to be a patterned or a bright shade, they’ll want an unusually shaped shade—so if you have a midcentury modern house, you might have an interesting floor lamp,” Rutledge explains. “You know, you want a big shade that’s going to have a dramatic angle to it, and we can make that.” For this reason, her store is also a popular source for replacement shades that can’t be found elsewhere. 

While the manufacturing is complicated—creating the base structure requires using specific sizes of rings and crossbars, depending on the type of lampshade, and rolling the fabric over the rings—it is the commitment to in-house production and attention to detail that make Bibelot Home unique.  “We begin with nothing,” says Rutledge. “We start with a flat piece of PVC that we order from England.” Then, she and her team cut every shape and size according to a pattern (“It’s like a dress pattern,” Rutledge explains), and finally, add the fabric and trim. Plus, Bibelot Home’s pleated shades are made distinctly differently from hardback shades, requiring additional skill and creativity.

But for Rutledge, it’s a labor of love. “There’s something very gratifying about taking someone’s art of the textile that they made and then making something for someone’s home with that,” she says.  

There have been elements of fabrication and artistry throughout Rutledge’s career. It began in marketing for the fashion industry, working for Diane von Furstenberg in New York. “They had just released the wrap dress. We were located in the meat-packing district, and it was a fun time,” she reflects.

Then she decided she wanted to be a chef. After working for several restaurants, including the 3-Michelin-Star Eleven Madison Park, she launched her own website featuring recipes for the home chef (yes, before that was a “thing”). It was following the tragedy of September 11 that Rutledge decided to return “home” to the South, where she discovered her passion for antiques while working for the Historic Charleston Foundation. As the Director of Development, she helped establish the Charleston International Antique Show (now known as The Charleston Show). 

Rutledge’s career shifted while raising her daughters and caring for her youngest, who had a rare medical condition that required hospital stays. When she recovered, her family moved back to Charleston from their home in Raleigh.

It was then that she purchased the antiques store and all its contents, which included rare artifacts from all over the world. There were items with elaborate architectural details, 18th- and 19th-century wood panels from a palace in Beijing, and 20 stone basins that needed to be moved with a forklift. “It was a crazy store,” Rutledge says with a laugh.

The twists and turns of her life seem to have led her to the Bibelot Home studio, where she is surrounded by the things she loves most: textiles. “Sometimes, clients bring in a piece of their own fabric that holds sentimental value. “All you need is a yard,” Rutledge says. “So, if you have a yard of fabric you’ve saved, it’s been a treasure in your family, or it was your parents’, and you’ve just hung onto it, that’s always great.” She explains that creating a custom lampshade with a meaningful material is one little thing that she can do for a room that makes a dramatic difference. “Clients are so happy when they see the finished product.”