Fur: friend or faux?

TENDER-HEARTED readers with impressionable children should be warned about the glossy pelts in the photograph opposite: the animal which supplied them was the possum. If that has you choking over your breakfast, then be assured that possum fur - handmade into cushions, throws and even hot-water-bottle covers by a company called Octavia Fox - is apparently an eco-friendly solution to the current fashion for filling rooms with animal skins, either real or fake.

Trends on the catwalk are now so speedily transferred to the home that it was only a matter of moments before the resurgence of fur found its way into the sitting-room. Octavia Fox, in fact, started with cow-skin cushions a few years ago, at about the time Michael Kors was showing his Friesian-cow skirt and everyone with a finger on fashion's erratic pulse was buying cow-print bags. When fur re-emerged, like the groundhog, from its dark hole, the company looked at possum potential.

Octavia Fox is Annabel Graham, a New Zealander, who chose that pseudonym because, as she blithely says, it sounded 'a bit snotty and discerning'. The fox bit is entirely coincidental (she doesn't offer vulpine skins), but she used the name in 1998 when she went into the Thai silk business with friends who had a weaving operation outside Bangkok.

Shortly afterwards, she heard about the potential in cowhide and possum skins. She now combines silk and possum, backing the glossy fur with vivid colours, in a range which she and Catherine Bardolph, divisional merchandise manager at Joyce, worked on together.

'I'd say, 'I'd like a beanbag', and she'd say, 'Oh my God, let me see if I can do that',' says Bardolph. 'We wanted to take fur and give it a Hong Kong attitude and add some humour.'

What about the ecological aspects? 'Being an Australian, I was horrified when she told me,' says Bardolph. 'Annabel's reply was that they run rampant in New Zealand and are culled anyway.'