Toraja Coral and Italian Velour Cushion

The front of the piece features a striking Toraja Pa’Tannun woven fabric, celebrated for its intricate patterns and deep cultural significance rooted in the traditions of the Torajan people in Indonesia. Each unit of cloth is a fruit of over 100 hours of handmade weaving.

The back is finished with sumptuous Italian silk velour, offering a luxurious texture and refined elegance. This thoughtful pairing brings together the rich heritage of Indonesian weaving with the timeless sophistication of European velour, resulting in a piece that embodies both cultural artistry and opulent luxury.

Each cushion is made to order, allowing time for careful craftsmanship and attention to detail. Your piece will be ready for shipping within 15 working days from the date of order.  It is an excellent birthday present for you and your loved ones. Please place your order now.

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Dimensions: 60 cm x 40 cm. High-quality insert included. Materials used for the front of the cushion: Handwoven cotton with artisanal natural dyes.Materials used for the back of the cushion: Italian silk velour. All of our cushions are made in Paris, France. Specialised dry clean only.

SKU: TEV001

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Among the highlands of South Sulawesi, the Toraja people have developed one of Southeast Asia's most visually and philosophically complex artistic traditions. Their cosmological system, aluk to dolo—the way of the ancestors—permeates every dimension of their material culture, from the soaring saddle-backed tongkonan houses to the richly ornamented ceremonial textiles known as sarita and ma'a. These sacred cloths, often passed down through generations, serve as markers of noble lineage and spiritual authority; they are draped over the deceased during elaborate funeral rites that can span days and involve entire communities in shared acts of weaving memory into cloth.

The visual language of Toraja decorative arts is anchored by bold geometric forms and a characteristic palette—ochre, rust, black, and cream—drawn from natural earth pigments and organic dyes. The pa'barre allo (sun motif), the pa'manuk londong (rooster pattern), and the pa'tedong (buffalo motif) appear with cosmological intent across woven and carved surfaces alike, communicating stories of ancestry, fertility, and power. It is this insistence on meaning embedded within form—pattern as cultural narrative that resonates through every thread of our heritage cushion collection.

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Italy's reputation for luxury cloth was built on silk, and on four cities. Between roughly 1300 and 1550, Lucca, Venice, Florence, and Genoa dominated European silk weaving, working raw fibre from Persia, Syria, Greece, and the Balkans alongside domestic sericulture. The drawloom was the defining technology, lifting warp threads in programmed sequences so that large, intricate patterns could repeat across a full bolt. On top of it came velvet — first woven in Europe in the second half of the thirteenth century, refined to its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth: pile cut or left as uncut loops, voided to reveal a satin ground, often brocaded with gold-wrapped thread. Venice closely regulated all of it, treating cloth quality as a matter of state.

That prestige was never incidental. Sumptuary law governed who could wear silk, and painters used it to signal rank — which is why much of what we know about historic weaves has been reconstructed from portraiture. It was a material for interiors as much as dress: the V&A's Renaissance velvet holdings include a papal carpet and velvet-covered caskets alongside vestments. A cushion inherits that logic directly. Pile catches and releases light as you move past it, so the surface is never quite the same twice, and a drawloom repeat rewards being read at close range — on a chair, at arm's length — rather than at architectural scale.