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✷ Dispatch No. 1: Alec Cobbe and the Paper Kingdom ✷

Welcome to the first edition of my Sunday Dispatch a weekly journal of creative inspiration, where I share a person, place, or piece of design that has captured my attention and made me fall in love with paper all over again.

There is something quietly majestic about a beautiful piece of stationery. It is the theatre curtain before the event begins, the first whisper of ceremony. Whether it arrives tucked into an envelope or passed across a polished table, good stationery has the power to stop time. It is part spell, part signal.

And despite the age of inboxes and instant replies, it still matters. Perhaps now more than ever.

This week I found myself utterly charmed by the world of Alec Cobbe. A man whose designs prove that paper can do more than just communicate. It can transport.

Cobbe is a restorer, collector, artist, and sometime magician of the decorative arts. He studied medicine at Oxford, where he won a prize for anatomical drawing, before abandoning it all in favour of art. He trained in painting conservation at the Tate and Courtauld, then went on to restore paintings for major institutions before setting up his own studio.

But it’s his design work that really sends me. His eye is so assured, so gloriously detailed. He has designed everything from royal stationery to museum displays and historic interiors for places like Dublin Castle, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Eton College, and Kenwood House. His archive has even been acquired by the V&A.

I first came across a photograph of a beautiful die-cut trompe l’oeil invitation he designed for someone’s 71st birthday. It was exquisitely painted and utterly strange in the best way, like something plucked from an 18th-century dressing room or an opera set. I’ve been completely beguiled ever since. Now, any time I catch even the faintest glimpse of his work, a crest here, a floral scroll there, I save the photo instantly and study every detail. Every single piece of it.

From there I fell headlong into Pinterest boards, auction listings, and fragments of the Cobbe Collection website, piecing together a world filled with baroque flourishes and theatrical restraint.

Born in Dublin and raised at Newbridge House in Donabate, Alec Cobbe grew up in what can only be described as a live-in museum of curious and beautiful things. His childhood home was without electricity but overflowing with portraits, architectural wonder, and a collection of treasures begun by his ancestors in the 1740s. It shaped a sensibility that feels at once scholarly and spellbound.

His stationery designs are not just proper. They are painterly and precise, intimate and imperial. Each one seems to exist at the intersection of theatre, history, and handwriting.

And of course, Newbridge House holds a bit of magic for me too. We take the boys there. Arthur had his first birthday picnic under the trees by the walled garden. We have fed goats, admired the grounds, and lingered over ice creams more times than I can count. There is a quiet thrill in knowing Alec Cobbe wandered those same paths, probably pausing by the same gates I now sketch for wedding menus and monograms.

So that is this week’s dispatch a love letter to paper, to the dignity of good design, and to a man whose work reminds us that an invitation is never just a piece of card. It is the beginning of something.

✧ Featured: A selection of Alec Cobbe designed royal stationery

✧ Keywords: Alec Cobbe, designer, classical stationery, Irish art, royal invitations, paper inspiration

✧ Listen while reading: “Heathens” by Vitamin String Quartet

✧ Read more about Alec Cobbe: Cobbe Collection