Contemporary Sculpture, Handcrafted in Suffolk
House of Clermont began in 2020, during lockdown, when an unexpected amount of time at home gave me the opportunity to explore an idea I’d had after admiring a piece of wall art.
I started by creating small wooden block pieces, experimenting with different angles, patterns and colour combinations. Having spent more than two decades working in paint manufacturing, colour had always been a huge part of my life, and I quickly became absorbed in developing my own designs.
Those original pieces gave the business its first name — Bertie’s Blocks. At the time, block work wall art was all we produced, so the name was a natural fit.
In 2021, I began experimenting with a completely different idea. I wanted to create something with greater depth and dimension, and developed the first of our cylindrical wall sculptures, using individually painted wooden elements of varying heights and diameters to create texture, movement and shadow.
That idea gradually transformed the direction of the business. The cylindrical sculptures became the work we were best known for and, over time, what we predominantly produced. Customer requests for different sizes, colour palettes and bespoke combinations pushed the designs further, while the introduction of metallic elements added another dimension to the pieces.
At the end of 2023, after 28 years in the paint manufacturing industry, I left my career to concentrate on the business full-time. It gave me the freedom I had wanted for years — to experiment with colour, materials and form and to continually develop new designs.
In 2024, my wife Sarah joined me after many years working in finance. We now run the studio together from our home in Sudbury, Suffolk. Every piece passes through our hands, from preparing and painting the individual elements to assembling, finishing and carefully packing the completed sculpture.
As the work evolved, we increasingly felt that Bertie’s Blocks no longer reflected what we were creating. The name belonged to where we started, but our predominantly sculptural work had taken the business in a very different direction.
So in 2026, Bertie’s Blocks became House of Clermont.
The name has a personal connection to where our work is created. Our home and studio are on Clermont Avenue, and our hometown of Sudbury is twinned with Clermont in France. House of Clermont therefore felt like a natural name for the next chapter — rooted in where we create our work while giving us the freedom to continue evolving our designs.
Today, House of Clermont creates contemporary wall sculpture combining natural materials, colour and metal. Each piece is made by hand, with variations in depth, diameter and finish creating texture, shadow and movement that changes as the artwork is viewed from different angles.
Alongside our collections, we continue to create bespoke pieces, working with customers to develop colour palettes specifically for their interiors. For us, one of the most rewarding parts of what we do is seeing a finished sculpture in the space for which it was created.
HOUSE OF CLERMONT
Where Nature Meets Metal
