WHEN graduates of Glasgow School of Art make the news it’s mostly because they’ve been selected for prestigious art world events such as the Venice Biennale, or because they’ve had the nod from the Turner Prize. The school has produced six winners of the UK’s biggest visual art prize and since 2005 nearly a third of all nominees have been Glasgow alumni.

But while the star status of artists such as Douglas Gordon keeps the flag flying for Glasgow abroad, it’s the work of his friends and art school contemporaries Paul Simmons and Alistair McAuley which is perhaps the purest expression of the city’s strength as a creative hub, and of its historic reputation as a place which marries design flair with hands-on technical expertise. A place whose citizens aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves, in other words. Nearly three decades on from the birth of Timorous Beasties, the whimsically-named vehicle for their equally whimsical wallpapers and textiles, it’s Simmons and McAuley more than anyone else who can claim to be the true inheritors of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Well, it’s a theory anyway. I don’t phrase it quite like that when I meet them at their studio and factory complex in an old warehouse in Glasgow’s Anniesland district, but for his part Simmons acknowledges Timorous Beasties’ place in the city’s creative lineage and says it’s his hope that the company will continue to be worthy of it. And as we’re touring the print room which dominates one floor of the building, it’s clear both men take as much pride in their labour as they do in its end product. I sense it first when they linger fondly over the 20 metre printing bench which runs the length of the room, and again when I hear the story of the bench’s provenance. Simmons and McAuley found it in bits in the garden of a Tarbert woman who used to work for wallpaper manufacturer Cole and Son. They swapped it for a couple of bottles of whisky, then packed it into their van for the drive back to Glasgow. Come Burns Night, it doubles as a dining table for 100 guests.

This visit is about looking forward, though, rather than back. In February a new London shop was launched, joining a portfolio of premises which also includes a London showroom (opened in 2007) and the shop on Glasgow’s Great Western Road which has served as Timorous Beasties’ flagship store for 15 years now. Even more ambitious, the company is in the process of finalising arrangements for a Berlin showroom, their first presence outside the UK. So why Berlin and why now?

“We always wanted to branch out, to take it outwith the United Kingdom,” says McAuley when we settle in his whitewashed office. “Berlin seemed really interesting. We knew a lot of people who lived and worked there. We knew very little about Berlin but it sounded fantastic. We had a good gut feeling about it. Glasgow-London-Berlin: it sounded to me just quite a romantic gesture. It sounded like the kind of thing a company like ours would do.”

Simmons takes up the story. “We’ve never really had definite plans as a business, we’ve always just taken opportunities as they’ve come along. So the space here has always been just kind of a fluke, people moving out and us taking it over. With Berlin, there’s a friend from art college days who owned the space who just happened to read in The Herald that we were looking to open there”.

That friend, by the way, was Douglas Gordon.

“It was just fortuitous,” adds McAuley. “There was a space downstairs, a lovely space. We went over two weeks later and said: ‘We’ll take it’.”

As well as recognising how good it looks on a business card, Simmons and McAuley’s Berlin venture is partly also a Brexit insurance policy.

“If we get into Europe and everything goes horribly wrong here then at least we’ll have a German company,” says McAuley. Could he see Timorous Beasties leaving Glasgow entirely and relocating to the German capital? He’s emphatic in his reply: “No,” he says.

Simmons is of the same mind. “We wanted to build bridges with Europe rather than what f****** Brexit is doing, which is the opposite. As far as moving there, I doubt it very much. I have kids in school, the studio here is great, and we really need to be around.”

It is hard to imagine them leaving. Glasgow’s sights, sounds, energy and humour is woven into the very fabric of the company – quite literally in the case of Glasgow Toile, one of Timorous Beasties’ most celebrated designs.

Available in both fabric and wallpaper, it was launched in 1994 and at first sight appears to be the sort of twee decoration you’d find in a Country Living interiors spread. Look more closely, however, and the details emerge. Against a gloomy cityscape of high-rises and desolate Victorian churches you see a young man in a baseball cap urinating against a tree. There’s another youth passed out on a bench with a syringe in his arm. There are feral kids on bikes, feral men walking dangerous dogs, women pushing prams and gravestones everywhere.

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An Edinburgh version took affectionate aim at the capital’s many contradictions and featured images of rough sleepers and what looks like a knife fight set against the city’s familiar Georgian backdrop. It caused consternation in some quarters when it was used on the cover of the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival programme.

“There was a slight Eureka moment but otherwise it came quite naturally,” Simmons says of the Glasgow Toile. He and McAuley had been given a last-minute slot at a design show in London but didn’t have much time to come up with anything. So they simply looked at the city around them and then Simmons drew on his love of toiles, a much (to his mind) discredited and overlooked form of wallpaper design.

“It was a combination of always really loving the old toiles and them not being talked about – not just the themes but also the quality of the prints – and then doing something that was based on the city that we were living in,” he says. “At the time we were both living in council flats. I was in Firhill, Ali was in Ruchill. I used to see people fighting up and down the streets not just with knives but with f****** cleavers. Our original studio was up in Maryhill so it seemed very natural to do a design based on that. And when we did exhibit it, we just printed it in the traditional toile colours of blue and red and covered everything in that. Sometimes these things just hit at the right moment.”

Reaction was mostly positive, though not everyone liked it and not everyone got the joke. A friend once told them about an over-heard conversation in which Timorous Beasties were cast as sell-outs for having done a toile, the detractor having failed to see beyond the form to the details subverting it. Others simply thought it demeaning to the city.

“There was the very rare person who would have a go and say: ‘You’re not showing Glasgow in a very positive light’,” says McAuley. “But these things go on. Glasgow to us is all sorts of things. It is a very beautiful city, it’s a very kind city, it’s great fun and all the rest of it. But it does have other things going on”.

Simmons chips in. “I think it has more impact being on a fabric. If some artist had done it on a painting in a gallery you’d be like: ‘Oh. Right. OK’. It wouldn’t be as shocking in a way. So I think the fact that it was from a textile company, on fabric, and it was something that was manufactured and people could buy, that made it funnier and gave it more impact.”

Simmons and McAuley met in 1984 when both enrolled on the textile course at Glasgow School of Art. Born in Brighton and raised in Glasgow, Simmons grew up in a house that was, in his words, all “floorboards and white walls”.

McAuley, on the other hand, was raised in a “pattern-tastic” council house in Duntocher. “It was hilarious. It was huge geometrics, mental florals and all in the same room. Net curtains and ridiculous colours of cushions. My mother, God love her, loved to make up a set of curtains and she had an eye for a bargain. But it was a total clash.” So that’s not where his love of textiles came from? “God no!”. It came instead from his talent for and love of drawing, something he persisted with despite the shortcomings of the school art department. He was only the second person from his school to attend Glasgow School of Art and even that came after a short stint in the shipyards.

At art school, meanwhile, he and Simmons were more likely to be printing onto wood, glass or paving stones than textiles, so a future career in wallpaper and soft furnishings was very far from their minds. After graduation, Simmons attended London’s Royal College of Art in London for two years while McAuley undertook a one-year post-graduate course in Glasgow, but even after they formed a partnership in 1989 and founded Timorous Beasties a year later their future path was unclear.

“A lot of people were setting up wee studios at the time because they weren’t getting jobs,” says McAuley. “We were thinking of doing anything at all, that’s why we chose the name Timorous Beasties. We didn’t want it to say: ‘fabrics and wallpaper’.”

Then again, the world of wallpaper and fabrics was more than ready for the kick up the swatches that Timorous Beasties administered. Employment-wise it offered little incentive to budding designers – “You’d get paid the same amount per design whether you’d spent five minutes on it or 10 weeks,” says Simmons – and art-wise the industry was dominated by traditional manufacturers of heritage products. Wallpaper, once described as “the pariah of the design world”, was not cool. Not yet, anyway.

“People have all sorts of reasons why they like or dislike things and there’s all sorts of reasons for what defines good and bad taste,” says Simmons. “But if you put anything together with something else, or use it with irony, or use it to its full capacity, or put it in a different context, or enlarge it, or whatever then there’s always a way to make something look brilliant. These things are a part of the design challenge. I mean when people start saying: ‘Oh f***, I hate wallpaper’, maybe that’s the time to try to prove to people that it can be an amazing thing.”

To date, Timorous Beasties have done amazing things not only with wallpaper and fabrics but also cycle bags, book covers, whisky bottles, bank notes – could the currency in an independent Scotland bear one of their designs? – and the tail fins on aeroplanes. They’ve designed a logo for Partick Thistle FC and their work has even featured on a capsule collection for sportswear retailer Nike.

As for celebrity clients, they don’t like to boast. But they will say that Mick Jagger is a former customer, actress Rachel Weisz once turned up to a trade show (nobody recognised her) and US comedian Marisa Tomei made an appointment but didn’t show. So who has been their most challenging client?

“They vary so much,” says Simmons. “Your best client is maybe a hotel project but at the same time you can get hotel projects which are really intensive. They might want something customised, they might want something hand-printed within that, so actually some take up far more time than others. Or you might have a very wealthy client who has quite a few country houses but they’ll want something very, very specific for one room and that can take months of your time. So you never really know. Ironically our best client was probably a guy from Belgium who lived in some jungle …”

A warning look from McAuley causes Simmons to stop. “No, okay,” he says, either to himself or his partner. “It’s a long story. And he died at the end of it”.

A far less troublesome client, though one who in other aspects is famously exacting, was the singer Kate Bush. She commissioned Timorous Beasties to design the programme for her 2014 concert series, Before The Dawn.

“We don’t really know how she found out about us, but she just rang up one day” says Simmons. “She had a very abstract idea of what she wanted. It was all very top secret. She wanted sky and sea and a combination of the two. It was late at night. It was quite funny. It obviously was her.”

Job done, Bush invited him and McAuley to London for one of the 22 concerts at the Hammersmith Apollo, her first live shows since 1979. “She said: ‘I really wanted to buy some wallpaper but I just couldn’t afford it’,” he laughs. “But it was good fun. And she still sends us a Christmas card every now and then.”

Timorous Beasties notches up its 30th anniversary next year. Doubtless there will be a party in the printing room but Simmons would also like to do a book and says an exhibition would be nice too, perhaps to coincide with Glasgow International, the city’s biennial art festival. One problem, however, is the lack of a company archive. Museums such as the V&A hold examples of Timorous Beasties products but very little survives either from art school days or from the early years of the company.

“We’ve only got a few metres kicking about,” says Simmons. “We’ve been like that all our lives, to our detriment I think – we’ve been more reactive than proactive about that kind of thing. And I wouldn’t have the balls to ring up the V&A.”

Maybe Kate Bush would do it for him. Either way, the anniversary and the mooted retrospective would only ever be treated as an opportunity to hit pause briefly, to accept handshakes and congratulations, to sneak a peek over the shoulder. The real business requires both sets of eyes to the front – facing the future and steering Timorous Beasties through its next decade. And what a decade it might be as digital technology and 3D printing brings new opportunities and challenges.

In terms of division of labour, these days Simmons tends to look after the creative side while McAuley does what he calls “the f****** dull stuff”, by which he means the day-to-day running of the 15-strong company. But could there ever come a point when Timorous Beasties became so big they had to bring in others to take over those key roles?

“It may well evolve to that,” says McAuley, “But we’re not really that sort of people. We like coming in here.” And he gestures round the airy office crowded with boxes and wall-charts to the space outside where young designers are bent over computers, filing cabinets are filled with swatches – I see Omni Splatt, Urban Landscape, Random Ruskin, Bloody Empire – and a collection of eight chairs in bubble wrap sit waiting shipment somewhere.

Back in the office, though, Simmons is still pondering a possible future in which he and McAuley do take a back seat. “Maybe we’ll just be in flotation tanks,” he muses.

“Separate floatation tanks,” his partner snaps back. “I’m not having you floating up against me.”

But it's said with a smile.