01
Provenance
Every garment we reclaim is sourced from a single mill region and logged by weight, wash, and decade. Nothing anonymous enters the atelier. We can tell you which county your sofa was worn in, and we will, at length, if asked.
Established 2019 · Kojima & Greensboro
Denim was never
meant to stay
in the wardrobe.
For a century, denim was asked to survive mines, rail yards, and harvests. We believe a fabric that durable has been underemployed. Jarpet & Japes builds the objects of the home — seating, refrigeration, bathing, flooring, window treatment — from reclaimed 12.5 oz. selvedge, cut on the bias and finished by hand.
Our position
02
Construction
Chain-stitched at 7 stitches per inch, the same density used on workwear seams in 1947. We do not fuse, glue, or heat-press anything. There is no adhesive anywhere in this catalogue except the Jallpaper, and that one hurt.
03
Patina
A Jarpet & Japes piece is delivered raw. It will fade in the shape of your household — where you sit, which side of the bed you take, which hand you open the fridge with. This is the intended outcome, not a defect, and it is the single most common subject of our support correspondence.
The Wash Ledger
The eleven grades
Every garment that enters the atelier is graded by eye, in north light, against a reference board. The ledger runs to four hundred pages and is the only document in the company nobody is allowed to take home.
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01
Mill Floor
Unworn deadstock, usually from a closure. Held for reference only. No Mill Floor denim has ever left this building inside a product.
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02
Nine Months
The first honest fade. Almost everything sold as “vintage wash” is an imitation of this grade, and not a close one.
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03
Commuter
Seat wear without knee wear. A person who sits for a living. Our most abundant intake and our least interesting.
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04
Two Winters
Even fade, no abrasion, slight relaxation at the waist. The workhorse of the Jouch seat deck.
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05
Weekend
Worn twice a week for years rather than daily for months. Fades differently and we can tell, though we accept that nobody has ever asked us to prove it.
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06
Trade
Worn for work. Knee abrasion, tool wear at the pocket mouth, occasionally a rule pocket stretched into a shape no rule was ever that size.
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07
Farm
Trade, plus sun. The only grade where the back of the leg is lighter than the front, and the reason we sort thighs separately.
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08
Whiskered
Defined hip creasing from a wallet, a phone, or a hand that always went to the same pocket. We do not cut across a whisker. Ever.
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09
Ten Summers
Indigo gone to the pale grey-blue that cannot be manufactured, only waited for. Reserved for Jindow panels and the outside arms of a Jouch.
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10
Repaired
Already mended once, by hand, by whoever owned it. We keep the repair, we keep the thread colour they chose, and we do not tidy it.
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11
Estate
Worn near-daily for a decade or more by one person. We receive perhaps forty pairs a year. They are not for sale, they do not enter production, and they go into the archive in Greensboro and stay there.
The Collection
Twenty objects, one fabric
Each piece is made to order in runs of forty. Lead times run from four weeks for the Jottoman to sixteen for a fitted commission.
Living
The room the company was founded in.
The Jouch
$4,280
Three-seat sofa · 41 pairs · Kiln-dried ash frame
The Joffee Table
$2,190
Woven low table · 26 pairs · Blackened steel base
The Jottoman
$980
Round pouf · 14 pairs · Waistbands intact
The Jookshelf
$3,150
Five-shelf case · 33 pairs · Steel-cored shelves
Sleeping
Eight hours a night against the same cloth.
Dining
The table takes the most wear of anything we make.
The Jinner Table
$6,900
Seats eight · 61 pairs · Rolled-denim pedestal
The Jairs
$1,140 each
Dining chair · 7 pairs · Tapered steel leg
Kitchen
Where we were told fabric does not belong.
The Jidge
$6,150
18.2 cu. ft. refrigeration · 37 pairs · Braided-hem gasket
The Jishwasher
$3,940
24″ built-in · 22 pairs · Copper-riveted control bar
Jented Jandles
$54
Poured candle · 60 hours · Denim vessel
Bathing
Our most contested category.
The Jathtub
$8,700
Freestanding roll-top · Sealed core · Cast brass feet
The Jink
$1,960
Vessel basin · 4 pairs · Sealed inner shell
The Joilet
$2,480
Two-piece · 9 pairs · Oak-rimmed seat
Surfaces
Floor, wall, and window. The whole envelope.
The Jarpet
$92 / sq. ft.
Wall-to-wall flooring · Hand-laid tiles · Jute backing
Jallpaper
$146 / roll
Wallcovering · 20″ bolt · Paste the wall
Japes
$1,320 / panel
Floor-length drapery · 108″ drop · Antique brass rings
The Jindows
On request
Glazing alternative · Made to opening · Not load-bearing
Feature — Seating
The Jouch
Our first object, and still the one that takes longest. Forty-one pairs are disassembled, graded by wash depth, and reassembled across the frame so that the seat deck reads darkest and the arms lightest — the way a pair of jeans wears on a body.
- Frame
- Kiln-dried ash, mortise and tenon
- Upholstery
- 14 oz. reclaimed selvedge, 41 pairs
- Fill
- Responsibly sourced feather-down, 25% latex core
- Dimensions
- 92″ W × 38″ D × 31″ H
- Lead time
- Eleven weeks
New — Jented Jandles
The aroma of denim
Four years of asking what a room made of reclaimed cotton actually smells like, answered in a sixty-hour pour. Top notes of raw indigo and cotton dust. A base of warm brass rivet and cedar shelf. The vessel is a cuff, hemmed and sealed, and it is meant to be kept.
$54 · 60-hour burn · Vessel refillable
The Atelier
Thirty-seven pairs, one appliance
Sheathing a refrigerator is not upholstery. The panel must hold tension across a door that opens two thousand times a year, tolerate condensation at the gasket line, and never obstruct the compressor intake. It took our team nineteen months and four failed prototypes to arrive at a construction we were willing to sell.
The result is a floating sleeve: denim tensioned over an aluminium sub-frame, held at forty-two points, removable in under four minutes for service. We timed this with a stopwatch, repeatedly, on a Sunday, because a number nobody has measured is not a specification.
- 37Pairs per Jidge
- 42Tension points
- 19Months in development
Press
“One is not certain whether to sit on it or apologize to it.”
Domestic Quarterly
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“I asked what the refrigerator was for. This was, I now understand, the wrong question.”
The Selvedge Review -
“They spoke for eleven minutes about a hem. I have thought about that hem every day since.”
Interiors Annual -
“A company that publishes a list of things it refuses to sell you is either very confident or very tired. Both, it turns out.”
Warp & Weft
- Domestic Quarterly
- The Selvedge Review
- Interiors Annual
- Warp & Weft
- Provenance
Ownership
Denim is not maintained.
It is lived with.
We are frequently asked how to wash a Jarpet. The answer is that you do not. Indigo is a surface dye; every wash removes a season of record. Vacuum weekly on the lowest setting, spot-treat with cold water and a soft brush, and rotate seating cushions each quarter. In seven years, no customer who asked us this question first has gone on to wash anything. We are quietly proud of that.
The Jishwasher is plumbed and serviced as a standard 24″ built-in. The denim sleeve is not rated for submersion and should be removed before any water-line work.
The Refusals
Objects we have declined to make
Published annually since 2021, at the suggestion of our Head of Construction, who holds that a catalogue is only meaningful alongside the list of things that did not get into it.
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The Joven
Fabric. Sustained heat. No. This one did not reach a second meeting.
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The Jireplace
As above, with an open flame and a statutory hearth clearance. Declined in under four minutes, which remains a record.
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The Jool
A swimming pool. We got considerably further with this than we should have — eleven weeks, a lined test tank, and a genuinely promising seam — before the obvious reasserted itself over a weekend.
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The Jattress
Denim does not breathe at mattress thickness. We are not in the business of making people perspire in their sleep, and the prototype made that case more persuasively than any memo could.
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The Jindshield
Requested four times, twice by the same person. It is glass. It has to be glass. We have written a standard reply.
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The Jarachute
An enquiry received in March 2023 which we assume was not serious. We answered it as though it were, at length, and did not hear back.
The House
Meet the Jounders
Three people who could not agree on very much except the fabric, the weight, the stitch count, the eleven grades, and what we will not make.
Head of Cloth
Grades every intake batch by hand and has never once been persuaded that a machine could do it faster. Maintains the wash ledger, which now runs to eleven grades and four hundred pages, and will read from it unprompted, to guests, after dinner. Owns one pair of trousers not made of denim and cannot account for how they got there.
Head of Construction
Responsible for the four failed Jidge prototypes and for the fifth. Holds that any piece which cannot be serviced in under ten minutes has no business being sold, a position that has removed several products from this page and one from this sentence. Keeps the stopwatch. Instituted the Refusals list on the grounds that a catalogue without one is a sales document.
Head of House
Handles commissions, surveys every Jindow personally, and is the reason we decline roughly a third of them. Believes the company’s chief asset is the willingness to say no to a customer holding a cheque, a belief tested most recently in February and, we are pleased to report, upheld.