My Itinerary

In good company: Winflo Curtains

The Winflo Curtains you know and love today, you may not be aware, started out as a tyre retailer. The missing link between tyres and home furnishings? Dunlop rubber underlay for carpets, of course.

It was Barry Walsh’s father who started the business, in 1940s Launceston, before Barry took over. The original shop was located on Saint John Street, positioned next door to Deans Phoenix Bakery (where Saint John Craft Beer can now be found). Eventually, the Walsh-owned business bought what had been the bakery’s quarters, expanding out across the two shopfronts.

Lucille, who now owns Winflo Curtains with her husband Mark, began her career in home furnishings as Sales Assistant under Barry Walsh.

“Barry was retiring, and when I left work, I was doing bits and pieces at home for them still. I’d had my son Zachary, and our daughter Alana was due in the February of 1994.”

In December, Barry told Lucille that he planned to retire by Christmas.

“I’m not interested,” were the words that came, unsurprisingly, from Lucille who was settling into her third trimester.

But, as life would have it, Lucille and her husband Mark had a change of heart that saw them not only taking over the Winflo business, but also Mark’s father’s farm – all at once. To some, such an ambitious undertaking might’ve sounded foolish, but it made the day of their official acquisition of the business – April 1, 1994 – beautifully symbolic.

The business rapidly outgrew the original space on Saint John Street, and with the need for a dedicated workroom becoming more and more apparent, the business was shifted up the road, closer to Elizabeth Street, where it stayed for several years before Lucille and Mark relocated again to their current address on Cimitiere Street.

Deans Phoenix Bakery
An advertisement for Deans Phoenix Bakery in trolley bus no. 311 (Sourced from The Examiner's 'Flashback Friday: July 29, 2004' article published Jul 25 2022).

Over her 30 years in business, Lucille has grown accustomed to noticing the curious idiosyncrasies of her clients, especially when it comes to their decision-making: the choices people make could be connected to something subconscious, she concedes.

“I notice that customers will often be wearing a piece of the colour that they’re actually looking for. I don’t know whether people consciously do it or not, but it’s very bizarre. I remember an older lady – I went to her one day – and she was wearing this gorgeous knit, a mohair cardigan that she’d made. And every colour she picked – it was a house lot, this job – she picked every colour in the combination of the cardigan. She wasn’t actually matching it to her cardigan, but that has happened to me so many times.”

When people are deciding on something for their home, their internal associations of comfort come into play. There are clients that come to Lucille with the conviction that they will rebel from the styling choices of their parent, but so often the selections they land on are eerily similar to those they were adamant they’d reject.

“’I’m not having what my mother had’,” Lucille recounts. “’You know those curtains? … Not them.’ And I say, ‘OK, no problem at all.’ And we’ll go through the options, and so often they’ll come back after two or three times and they choose something so close to what their mother had. It must be in our makeup to do things like that.”

“It is so personal, the journey you go on with those people. Some of them you become quite attached to.”

For Lucille and Mark, their customer base is primarily made up of those who have returned time and time again over the years.

“I had a lady I was talking to yesterday; I had done a project for her, but it was a long time ago. She’s been waiting for over 19 years. She’s got blinds in her bedroom, but she always wanted to have beautiful sheers. She came in yesterday and said, ‘I’m ready to do it. The kids have moved out. This is my time now.’”

“People wait a long time to get what they want,” says Lucille.

In some cases, she’s seen the grown-up child of a long-time client, and even the adult great-grandchild of an historical customer of the Winflo business.

It goes to show that, in Launceston particularly, people are partial to familiarity. Lucille reflects on the short-lived ventures of major franchises in Launceston, such as those selling discount soft furnishings, noting that the service her business offers goes beyond the transactional.

And as such, there is a great deal to be said for the emotional connection formed between the people in a business and the clients they service. “You’re very involved with people because you’re in their personal space, and helping them choose things that are quite personal to them.”

Lucille has acquired numerous stories from customers over the years. She has shared great happiness with them, as well as great pain. Always, she considers it a privilege to enter their homes, the central place that bore witness to their life’s journey. Of course, the way one arranges and selects the things inside their home environment reflects their response to life. For example, after the loss of a child or partner, she’s observed, some people decide a thorough overhaul is required. Others prefer to not change a single thing.

“It is so personal, the journey you go on with those people. Some of them you become quite attached to.”

When it comes to her approach in assisting people in the decision to refurbish their home, hers is of the ‘less is more’ variety – for her, she is the conduit between the vision of the client and implementation, and the more accurately she can complete that transformation, the better. She inadvertently provides a kind of moral support for her clients, figuratively holding their hand as they step forward in their personal evolution.

Romo Gardenia collection
Whether it's timeless elegance or the charm of yesteryear that you're after, Winflo has a voracious catalogue of stunning designs to please any palate. Image from Romo's Gardenia collection.

While she knows when to step back and allow the client to arrive at their decision, it’s evident that Lucille is a woman of taste and that her expertise is invaluable to her customers. It’s this quality of discernment that she attributes to her late grandmother.

“She had beautiful taste, and she was always immaculately dressed, even when she was in the old folks’ home. Even then, she still had a colour-coded wardrobe with matching coat hangers.”

Fittingly, Lucille has had a long love affair with interior design, and though she never received any formal training in that area specifically, she attended the School of Fashion in Launceston. Within those red brick walls, Lucille honed her craft, eventually focussing her skills on soft furnishings.

“While I was in high school, I got a job at the hairdressers. One of the customers there, Pat, used to make curtains for Winflo, and we had quite a strong bond. She was also teaching the soft furnishings course where I was going to the School of Fashion, so I used to see her fairly regularly.

“After I met Mark, and we were building our house, I thought I’d better learn how to make curtains and cushions, so I did two years at the School of Fashion and then I started with Pat. That was just a part-time course on Thurdays. I was doing alteration work with clothing. I just loved the soft furnishings, I felt like ‘this is it’.

“Pat recommended me to Winflo; someone had left, they didn’t advertise, and I went round and got the job. Barry let me go down to the college on Thursdays until I finished.”

But it wasn’t always about textiles for Lucille. While she relates her stories as a businesswoman, it is obvious in her compassion for others that she possesses a markedly nurturing character, so it’s no surprise when she says she would have loved to have been a nurse. She had some challenges in high school that she ascribed to the teaching style in Australia at the time, which she says ultimately deterred her.

“The teaching in England was so different to here. It was the 80s and 90s. I just struggled with the learning here, and I tried really hard.”

She had spent several years as a child in the UK with her family, she explained.

“Dad got the chance to go and work in England. We were only going for three months. Three months turned into six months, twelve months … and it blew out to just over three years.”

Lucille’s family left Australia at the start of her fifth school year. She reminisces delightedly: “We used to travel heaps while we were over there. We’d go do all sorts of things. It was amazing. I was so lucky to have that.”

For the period they lived there, they resided in Bournemouth, a southern coastal town about 50km outside Southampton.

“From Southampton, you could catch the ferry and go across to Paris for the weekend!” says Lucille, full of the joys of memory.

In the 70s, an Englishman who resided in Australia had travelled back to his motherland for holiday when he noticed a strange absence of pool tables. The Englishman returned to Australia, and approached Lucille’s father, a joiner by trade, to help him make up a hundred tables in kit form to send over to England.

“They bought us a terrace house in Bournemouth, with stables for the workshop, and for three years Dad made those tables and put them into bars across the country. Mum used to help him, too.”

Strawberry Thief teal Morris Clarke Clarke
The iconic 'Strawberry Thief' design by William Morris (1883) in Clarke & Clarke's Teal colourway, available at Winflo Curtains.

On the Winflo Curtains website, Lucille’s bio claims she is the 'resident Anglophile', and certainly, a testament to that time in England can be found within her shop’s walls: Winflo is one of the very few official stockists of the official William Morris designs for wallpaper, upholstery fabrics, and curtains.

“I’d been to a tradeshow in Sydney. We’d had a couple of odd books [of William Morris’ designs] over the years, but when I saw [an official wholesaler of Morris' designs at the show], I said to Mark, ‘We really should get onto that.’ They weren’t just selling the books to anyone on the day; you had to go in and be interviewed. So, they interviewed us, and as I was walking out the door, another store from Launceston was going in behind us. I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t think we’ll get it.’ Anyway, they wrote me a letter in the mail a few weeks later, and I got it!”

Only a handful of wholesalers in the world have the licensing for Morris’ designs, with their respective collections differing in format. In relation to the original artworks, and each other, these companies produce the patterns on various scales and sometimes in altered colourways.

These wholesalers prefer to select conscientious retailers, like Winflo, who understand and appreciate the history of William Morris and his designs – a tactic that maintains a level of exclusivity. Lucille now has people coming from all over the state to buy the official William Morris designs from Winflo.

But it's not just their gorgeous array of products and designs that have people gathering from near and far – Winflo's ability to custom make many items in-house posits them as one of the few soft furnishings businesses in Tasmania that can truly tailor their services to their customers.

For Lucille and Mark, their pride and joy can be found in their aptitude to assist people as they beautify their homes, and it’s the unwavering passion and care that they put into each and every job that has earned them an incomparable reputation in the Launceston community.

In good company is a series of interviews undertaken with local small business owners and their employees to help the public learn more about their favourite Launnie businesses, how they came to be and what drives them. They're usually posted to our social media first, and those posts will be linked at the end of the interview so that you can share them if you'd like to. So settle in and scroll on to hear tales from beyond the counter, and maybe even discover somewhere completely new ... Wherever these interviews lead you, we're sure you'll find yourself In good company.

- The Launceston Central team