Our story — Meet Clifton
I spent eleven years as a materials researcher at the University of Tasmania, most of it in a basement lab in Sandy Bay cataloguing fibre degradation rates in heritage textiles. It was exacting, quiet work, and I liked it. What I did not like was that almost everything I studied was falling apart, and almost nothing being made to replace it was built to last more than a few years. That gap between what I knew about materials and what was actually available to buy kept nagging at me. Somewhere around 2019 I started keeping notes, not for a paper but for myself, about what a well-made household object would actually need to look like.
Before the research career I grew up in Huonville, about twenty minutes north of where the workshop is now. My father repaired furniture out of a shed on Wilmot Road and I spent a lot of school holidays watching him assess pieces, press joints, reject materials he thought were wrong for the job. He had strong opinions about wool felt, about the weight of brass fittings, about the smell of particular timbers. I absorbed more of that than I realised at the time. The academic work gave me language and method for those instincts but it did not replace them. When I eventually left the university in late 2021 I was forty-three and not entirely sure what came next.
The actual starting point was a single journal I made for my own use in January 2022. I had been unable to find one that satisfied me: the leather covers I tested were either too thin or lined with synthetic foam that off-gassed badly. I sourced 1.4 mm vegetable-tanned hide from a tannery outside Ballarat and used wool batting left over from a different project to line it. I made four copies, gave two to colleagues, and within six weeks had eleven requests from people who had seen theirs. I registered PIMLICO ROAD CRAFTSMEN PTY. LTD. in March 2022 and moved into the Cygnet workshop that August. The name comes from the street in Huonville where my father's shed still stands.
The workshop is about 90 square metres in a converted weatherboard building on Mary Street in Cygnet. We keep the range small and we test materials longer than is probably commercially sensible. Most orders ship within five days. I still do the materials selection myself and I still find it the most interesting part of the job, which I take as a reasonable sign that this was the right decision.
— Make it right the first time. — Clifton, Clifton George Rushby
Journal
How I ended up sourcing wool from down the road
After six months of dead ends with interstate suppliers, the right fleece turned out to be forty minutes from my front door.
When I first started thinking about lining the journals with wool, I had this idea I'd need to go interstate, probably to the Riverina, to find something with the right handle and weight. I spent about six months emailing suppliers, requesting samples, getting nowhere particularly useful. Most of what came back was either too coarse for something sitting against your wrist all day, or the minimum order quantities were designed for manufacturers running hundreds of units a week, not someone working out of a converted shed in Cygnet. I kept the samples in a shoebox on my desk and looked at them a lot.
Then in late February I went to the Huon Valley Producers Market in Ranelagh, mostly to buy leeks if I'm honest, and got talking to a woman named Sandra who runs a small Corriedale operation out past Geeveston. She had about 14 fleeces she was trying to move before shearing in October, and she let me handle a few right there next to the vegetable stall. Corriedale is a dual-purpose breed, not as fine as Merino, but the staple length is generous and when you card it down for lining use the result is dense and surprisingly soft. I bought four fleeces that morning.
Getting the wool processed into a usable liner format took another couple of months. There's a small processing operation in Huonville that handles batts and roving for local spinners, and they were willing to work with me on a custom thickness. We went through three trial runs before settling on a batt weight of around 180 grams per square metre, which gives the journal cover a slight puff without making it look inflated. The processing cost per fleece is not cheap, but the yield is good and there's almost no waste I can't use somewhere.
What I didn't expect was how much the local sourcing would change the way I think about the journals themselves. When the wool comes from forty minutes away and I know roughly which paddock it came from, there's an accountability to the object that I find useful. It's not romantic, it's practical. If Sandra's fleeces change character from one year to the next because of feed or weather, I need to know that. We've ended up having a fairly ongoing conversation about her flock that I didn't anticipate when I was standing next to the leeks.
The Corriedale liner is now standard across all the journals. I keep a small reserve of processed batt in the shed, enough for about 30 covers, and reorder from Sandra once or twice a year depending on sales. It's a small supply chain and it works because it's short. I don't think I'd go back to trying to source this remotely even if the economics pushed me toward it.
The linen throw in a genuinely cold house
I live in an old weatherboard with no central heating, so anything I sell that's meant to be warm gets tested harder than most product descriptions would suggest.
The house I rent in Cygnet was built in the 1940s and has the thermal performance you'd expect from that era, which is to say almost none. In July the temperature inside regularly sits at 9 or 10 degrees Celsius by morning before I get the wood heater going. I mention this because it means anything I describe as warm or comfortable has actually been tested under those conditions, not just held up in a well-lit studio and photographed. The Ocean Blue linen throw lives on the back of the couch and it's been in active use since April.
Linen is interesting in cold weather because its reputation is entirely summery. People think of it as a hot-climate fabric, and in terms of breathability that's accurate, but a linen throw with a reasonable weight, ours is 380 grams per square metre, holds heat against the body quite well when you're sitting still. It's not a substitute for wool when you're genuinely freezing, but for the gap between comfortable and cold, which in this house is most of winter evenings, it does the job. The fabric also softens noticeably with use, which I think is worth saying because the first wash can feel slightly stiff.
I've washed mine four times since autumn and the colour has held. The blue is a medium slate tone, not the vivid cobalt it looks like on a screen, and I was worried about fading because I hang it on a line that gets direct morning sun. After four cold washes on a short cycle there's been no visible change that I can measure. I did have one customer contact me in June to say hers had pilled slightly at one corner, and I asked her to send it back. The pilling was from a velcro fastening on a cushion cover rubbing against it. Worth knowing.
The practical question I get asked most is whether linen wrinkles badly. Yes, it does, and I've stopped pretending otherwise. If you fold the throw and leave it for a few days you'll get creases. They shake out mostly, and after a few minutes of body heat from sitting under it they relax further. If you need something that looks perfect on the couch at all times, linen is probably not your material. If you're actually using it, the wrinkles become part of how it looks and I don't think about them anymore.
I've been sitting under this particular throw most evenings for three months now while I do my reading, which is how I do most of my product testing, by just living with the thing. The size, 130 by 170 centimetres, is right for one person on a couch without excess fabric pooling on the floor. That dimension wasn't arbitrary; I measured six different throws I already owned before settling on it.
What actually happens before a candle batch is ready
The cedarwood candle took eleven test pours before I stopped second-guessing the fragrance load, and that number felt both embarrassing and necessary.
I started developing the cedarwood candle in winter, which in retrospect was good timing because I was burning candles constantly anyway and could evaluate each test version in actual use conditions rather than sniffing cold wax in a shed at 8am. The base is a soy wax I source through a Melbourne distributor who supplies a reasonable amount of the small Australian candle market. I specify a container blend rather than a pillar blend because container soy has a lower melt point and pools more evenly in the glass vessels I use. This sounds like a minor detail but it affects whether you get a clean burn across the full diameter or a tunnel down the middle.
The fragrance oil is a cedarwood and vetiver blend I had made up by a Sydney formulator after I decided I didn't want a straight cedarwood, which can read as either pencil shavings or bathroom cleaner depending on the concentration. The vetiver adds a slightly earthy base that grounds it. Getting the fragrance load right took most of those eleven test pours. Too low and the room scent is barely there; too high and the hot throw becomes aggressive and slightly synthetic. I landed at 9 percent fragrance to wax by weight, which is on the higher end for soy but within the safe use guidelines for the specific oils.
Wick selection is where I spent the most time and made the most mistakes. The vessel I use is a 290ml straight-sided glass jar, and the correct wick diameter for that size depends on the specific wax and fragrance combination, not just the jar dimensions. I tested cotton wicks in three different series, went through about 40 individual pours across different configurations, and ended up with a double-wick setup using a medium ECO series wick. A single wick of the appropriate size for that jar was tunnelling slightly in the soy blend I use. Two smaller wicks solved it.
The pour temperature matters more than I initially thought. I was initially pouring at around 65 degrees Celsius and getting a rough, slightly pitted surface on cooling, which is a known issue with soy. Dropping to 58 degrees and pouring slowly gave a smoother finish. I also learned to pour in batches of no more than 12 jars at a time in my shed because the ambient temperature in Cygnet in winter drops fast enough that if I pour 20 jars the last ones cool at a different rate than the first ones and you can see the difference in the surface.
A finished batch takes about 48 hours before I consider it stable enough to label and box. Soy wax continues to cure after it sets and the scent throw in the first 24 hours is not representative of what it will be after a few days. I've started noting the cure date on my production records rather than just the pour date. It's a small thing but it keeps me honest about when a batch is actually ready.
March in Cygnet, and what the summer taught me
The apples are nearly done and the light is starting to go golden earlier, which is when I tend to do my best thinking about what isn't working.
The Huon Valley does its most visible thing in late summer. The apple orchards around Cygnet are winding down, the roadside stalls are doing their last big push on Pink Ladies and Fuji, and the evenings have that particular quality of cooling faster than you expect. I've been here three years now and this seasonal turn still catches me slightly off guard, in a way I actually like. I spent twelve years in academia, the last six at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, and the academic year ran on a completely different rhythm. March used to feel like preparation. Now it feels like assessment.
This past summer was the first time Pimlico Wares had enough sales volume to tell me something useful. I started the business properly in early 2023 with about 8 SKUs and I've kept it at 12 since August last year. The bamboo dining set moved more slowly than I projected, not because anyone complained about it, but because it's a considered purchase and I don't think I've explained it well enough online. The journal and the throw did better than I expected, particularly through November and December, which I'd assumed would be slow given that most of my customers seem to be in cooler southern states and summer feels counterintuitive for those products. I was wrong about that.
I've been going through the shed this week, which I do at the end of every season, partly to count stock and partly because the physical act of handling everything helps me think. The shed is about 18 square metres, attached to the back of the house, and it doubles as my packing and photography space. In summer it gets to 32 degrees in the afternoon and I've learned to do any wax work before 10am. In the corner I still have a box of the first journal prototypes from 2022, the ones with the wrong binding that I never sold. I keep them because they remind me that the current version took a specific number of failed attempts to arrive at.
The turning point for the business, if there was one moment, was a journal I made for myself in mid-2022 when I was trying to decide whether to leave my research position. I'd been studying material culture, specifically the domestic object as a site of routine and meaning, for long enough that I felt some obligation to make something rather than just write about things other people made. That first journal was rough. The leather was too stiff, the wool liner was uneven, the stitching at the spine was inconsistent. But I used it for six months and by the end I knew exactly what needed to change.
I don't write about that origin story much because it sounds more considered in retrospect than it actually was. The decision to leave the university was mostly exhaustion and a small inheritance that gave me 18 months of runway. The journal was the thing I happened to be making when I needed to make something. That it turned into a product line is partly luck and partly the fact that I already knew, from the research, what makes a domestic object worth keeping. March feels like a good time to remember both of those things.
Customer reviews
Sarah M. — Fitzroy, VIC — 2024-03-12 — 5/5
Journal arrived in great shape
Ordered the Wool Lined Leather Journal on a Tuesday and it was at my door by Thursday — didn't expect that from Tasmania to Melbourne. The leather feels solid and the wool interior is a nice detail. Already using it daily for work notes. Good packaging too, nothing rattling around.
Tom B. — Newtown, NSW — 2024-05-28 — 4/5
Candle burns clean, scent is subtle
The Cedarwood Scented Soy Candle is good — not overpowering, which is what I wanted for a small study. Burn time seems solid so far, about 12 hours in and the wick is still behaving. Took off one star only because the lid was a bit stiff out of the box, but that's minor.
Priya K. — South Melbourne, VIC — 2024-07-04 — 5/5
Linen throw is genuinely useful
Bought the Ocean Blue Linen Throw Blanket after seeing it on a friend's couch. It's the right weight — not too heavy for warmer nights but enough for a cool evening. Washed it once already and it came out fine, no shrinkage I can notice. Would buy again as a gift.
Jake R. — Paddington, QLD — 2024-09-17 — 4/5
Desk lamp looks the part
The Vintage Brass Desk Lamp is well built and looks exactly like the photos. Assembly took about five minutes. My one note is that the cord is on the shorter side — I had to rearrange my desk setup slightly. Overall happy with it and the price seems fair for what you get.
Amelia T. — Fremantle, WA — 2024-11-02 — 5/5
Bamboo dining set — solid buy
The Bamboo Fibre Dining Set replaced a mismatched collection of bowls and plates I'd been putting up with for years. The pieces are a consistent weight and feel durable. Dishwasher safe as stated, and after about six washes the finish still looks new. Delivery to Fremantle was six days, reasonable.
Chloe N. — Brunswick, VIC — 2025-01-14 — 5/5
Gift wrap was a nice touch
Ordered the journal as a birthday gift with the gift wrap option. It arrived looking genuinely presentable — kraft paper, wax seal, handwritten card. My friend asked where I bought it before she'd even opened the packaging properly. Will be ordering from Pimlico Wares again.
Marcus D. — West End, QLD — 2025-02-20 — 4/5
Candle good, slight delay on dispatch
The cedarwood candle is exactly what I was after — clean scent, no synthetic edge to it. My only comment is that dispatch took three days rather than the one day I expected, but the tracking updated once it was moving and it arrived fine. Product itself gets full marks.
Rachel F. — Norwood, SA — 2025-04-08 — 5/5
Throw blanket — better in person
The Ocean Blue Linen Throw Blanket is one of those things that photos don't quite do justice. The colour is a bit deeper and more textured in real life. It's gone on the end of the bed and gets used every night. Sizing is generous for a throw — fits across a queen bed with a decent overhang.
Shipping
All orders from Pimlico Wares are dispatched from our workshop in Cygnet, Tasmania. Standard orders are sent via Australia Post and typically arrive within 3–8 business days depending on your location — metro areas in VIC, NSW, and QLD tend to land at the lower end of that range, while WA, NT, and rural addresses should allow the full window. Express orders are handled through StarTrack and are usually delivered within 1–3 business days for metro customers. To qualify for same-day dispatch, orders must be placed before 2pm AEST Monday to Friday. Orders placed after that cutoff, or over the weekend, go out the next business day. All prices on our site are inclusive of GST.
Standard shipping is free on all orders over $80 AUD. Orders below that threshold are charged a flat rate calculated at checkout based on your postcode and the weight of your order. We pack orders in recycled cardboard boxes with paper fill — no single-use plastic where we can avoid it. Fragile items like the Vintage Brass Desk Lamp and Cedarwood Scented Soy Candle are wrapped individually to keep things secure in transit. You'll receive a dispatch confirmation email with a tracking number as soon as your order leaves us, so you can follow it through the Australia Post or StarTrack tracking portals directly.
If your order arrives damaged, take photos of both the packaging and the item before doing anything else, then contact us at hello@pimlicowaresau.com.au within 48 hours of delivery. We'll assess the damage and either send a replacement or issue a refund — whichever works best for you. We do not consider an order lost until it has been in transit for 10 business days for standard delivery or 5 business days for express. After those windows, contact us and we'll lodge an inquiry with the carrier on your behalf. We aim to resolve all damage or loss claims within 5 business days of being notified.
Returns
We accept returns within 30 days of the delivery date. To be eligible, items must be unused, in their original condition, and sent back in the original packaging with your proof of purchase. This applies to change-of-mind returns — if you ordered the wrong thing, decided it wasn't right for your space, or simply want something different. Return postage for change-of-mind returns is the customer's responsibility. We recommend using a trackable service, as we can't take responsibility for return parcels that go missing in transit. To start a return, email hello@pimlicowaresau.com.au with your order number and reason, and we'll confirm the return address and process within two business days.
Your rights under the Australian Consumer Law are separate from our 30-day return policy and apply regardless of whether a purchase is on sale or has been used. If a product has a major fault, is not fit for purpose, or does not match its description, you are entitled to a remedy under the ACL — this may be a repair, replacement, or refund depending on the nature of the fault. You do not need to return a product in its original packaging to exercise your ACL rights. If you believe your item has a fault covered under the ACL, contact us with photos and a description and we'll work through it with you promptly.
Once we receive and inspect your return, we'll email you to confirm it's been processed. Refunds are issued to the original payment method within 5–7 business days of that confirmation — your bank's processing time may add a day or two on top of that. Store credit is also available if you'd prefer. Items that are not eligible for return include candles that have been burned, any personalised or custom orders, items returned without original packaging, and products damaged through misuse or incorrect care. Sale items marked as final sale at the time of purchase are also excluded from change-of-mind returns, though ACL rights still apply.