This gorgeous cushion features authentic Cirebon batik from a northern coastal town in West Java, Indonesia, that reflects the region’s rich heritage and intricate motifs. The artisan worked on this batik for more than 100 hours over two months.
The back is crafted from luxurious French silk velvet, renowned for its softness, elegant sheen, and enduring quality, adding a touch of European refinement to the piece. This unique cushion beautifully unites Indonesian craftsmanship and culture with the timeless sophistication of French textiles, making it a striking accent for any interior.
Each cushion is made to order, allowing time for careful craftsmanship and attention to detail. Your beautiful piece will be ready within 15 working days from the date of order. It is an excellent present for you and your loved ones. We invite you to place your order now.
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Dimensions: 45 cm x 45 cm.Materials used for the front of the cushion: Hand-drawn Batik fabric made from 100% cotton. Materials used for the back of the cushion: French silk velvet. All of our cushions are assembled in Paris, France. Specialised dry clean only. Kindly note the insert is not included. SKU: CBF003
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Cirebon, a former sultanate on the north coast of West Java, has always been a meeting place. Sundanese, Javanese, Chinese, Arab, and European currents converged in its harbour, and its art absorbed them all. Nowhere is this clearer than in its batik. The city's signature motif, megamendung — the "great cloud" — renders billowing cloudbanks in serene, stepped gradations of colour, a form whose ancestry reaches back to the cloud imagery of Chinese art and to the patronage of the Cirebon courts. Alongside it appear rock-and-garden motifs evoking the palace water-garden of Sunyaragi, and the sea creatures of a fishing port — among them the shrimp that serves as the city's own emblem.
Much of this work is centred on the village of Trusmi, where families have drawn batik for generations, mastering the layered waxing and dyeing that give the cloud motif its luminous depth. Cirebon batik is, at heart, a record of cultures learning to live within one frame. It is precisely that quality — distinct traditions resolved into a single harmonious surface — that we hope to honour when such a cloth becomes a cushion.
Cirebon's traditions remember a marriage that bound two worlds together. Sunan Gunung Jati, the revered founder of the city's Islamic line, is said to have wed Ong Tien, a princess who came from China. With her arrived artisans, porcelain, and the cloud-and-rock imagery of the Chinese aesthetic — an inheritance that local tradition links to the very motifs for which Cirebon batik is now famous.
The story is told less as a tale of conquest than of welcome: a union in which a foreign bride was received with honour, and her artistry woven permanently into the fabric of her new home. In the same lineage is remembered Rara Santang, a princess of the inland kingdom of Pajajaran whose journey and marriage carried the founding family across faith and distance. Together, these accounts frame Cirebon's identity as something born of love that reached across borders — and they explain, in the region's own voice, why its cloth speaks so many languages at once.
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French Textile Heritage
France's textile story runs through Lyon, the city that became Europe's silk capital. Louis XI tried to plant silk manufacture there in 1466, but local resistance pushed the project to Tours; it was François I who made it hold, granting letters patent in 1536 that installed the Piedmontese merchants Étienne Turquet and Barthélemy Naris in the city, followed in 1540 by a monopoly on raw silk imports. By the reign of Louis XIV, Lyon's workshops were producing silks, velvets and brocades of such refinement that they became instruments of courtly display and national prestige. Their visual vocabulary — floral motifs, baroque scrollwork, and later the narrative scenes of Toile de Jouy, printed at Jouy-en-Josas from 1760 — dressed palaces, churches and aristocratic houses, binding textile design into the identity of French luxury.
The skill behind these fabrics lived in trade corporations and family ateliers, where technique passed from one generation to the next. In Lyon, master weavers worked the drawloom, an intricate apparatus that required a second pair of hands to lift the pattern threads, to produce figured silks long before Jacquard mechanised the process in 1804. In Normandy, Alençon built its reputation on needle lace after Colbert established a royal lace workshop there in 1665; in Artois, Arras became known from the seventeenth century for a fine white bobbin lace. A few houses still carry that thread: Tassinari & Chatel (founded 1680) and Prelle (founded 1752) reweave historic patterns from their own archives for Versailles and other palaces, drawing on period records and hand looms alongside modern equipment, while Hermès has its tie silks woven and finished in the Lyon region.
On a luxury cushion, this inheritance shows up as fabric that balances opulence with restraint: dense damasks, softly lustrous silks, printed linens that recall the poise of eighteenth-century interiors. Each weave carries a tradition in which textile design was treated as a major art — commissioned by kings, refined by artisans whose names are sometimes recorded and often not, but whose standards still govern the thread.
