In spite of Miranda Priestly’s snub, florals for spring always get high style marks in our book. Beyond the classic colorful blossoms, the stories behind these six wallcoverings will add a richness to any room.
The Vale London
From the travels and botanical sketches of The Vale founder Melinda Marquardt come the Cynara, the Dahling and the Tassel Berry. The three elegant wallcoverings are the floral options in brand’s new Beaufort collection, available in dusty pink, a soft aquamarine, ashy white or warm gray.
The story: “The goal with all of my designs is to provide art for the home. I want every piece to show the hand of the artist, and for the viewer to discover more details in the work the longer they look at it,” Marquardt tells BOH. “As you look closely at each piece, you will discover another brushstroke you didn’t see before or the echo of a pencil mark that was erased.”
Flora and fauna: The collection plays on not only floral motifs, but animals as well—Serpent Scale is a modern interpretation of a snake’s scales in a nonwoven mica, while Tassel Berry depicts African gray parrots on berry-laden branches in a sisal and kraft paper metal foil.
Graham & Brown
From Graham & Brown comes an alluring trio of wallpapers: In the noir colorway, Venetian offers a jeweled incandescence; Edo Toile’s cascading dreamscape charms with a cloud-ridden design; and Resplendence, featuring peacocks perched on rose branches, brims with whimsy.
The story: Since 1946, U.K.-based Graham & Brown has been designing and manufacturing beautiful high-end wallpaper. For these new designs, stylist Jody Hudson spent hours rifling through files in the brand’s archive, she tells Business of Home. On finding the Venetian: “It was like a piece of treasure, beautifully painted.” Edo Toile’s original design was painted in blues and oranges that inspired the collection’s Navy colorway.
Eyes open: Hudson hopes designers will spot the flashes of primary colors in Venetian’s smaller floral details: “That is how the design was found, how the artist originally painted it.”
Brunschwig & Fils
From Brunschwig & Fils comes the Summer Palace collection, inspired by historical Chinese culture. The wallpapers walk the line between honoring tradition and feeling new: Cirque Chinois and Ming Dragon are lively and youthful, while the Jardin Fleuri, the Tongli and the Luang have more classic patterns enlivened by vivid colors.
The story: “The Summer Palace garden in northwest Beijing is the best-preserved imperial garden in the world and the largest of its kind still in existence in China,” explains design director Danielle St. George. “We were enamored with its meticulously landscaped gardens—featuring natural hills and open water, ancient pavilions, sacred temples and charming bridges, all designed to achieve harmony with nature and please the eye. We designed and collected documents, artworks and archival pieces that could be transformed to tell this story.”
Evergreenery: The Tongli wallpaper features traditional pavilions surrounded by Chinese pine trees, cultural symbols that represent longevity and virtue.
Paolo Moschino for Nicholas Haslam Ltd.
The fabrics and wallcoverings of Paolo Moschino for Nicholas Haslam Ltd. are now available in the U.S. through Lee Jofa. As part of its stateside debut, the brand has launched a fresh line of wallcoverings—the De la Tour wallpaper, a delicate and classic floral; the Roche, a graphic interpretation of layered petals; the Aurora, with its bushels of blossoms; and the Palmyra, a metallic palm tree–inspired design—to name but a few.
The story: Designers Paolo Moschino and Philip Vergeylen are inspired by their “love of work, books, travel, artworks and people.” For some designs, their team looked to French artist and designer Serge Roche for inspiration. On others, like Palmyra, hand-drawn abstractions were repeated to form the pattern.
The crowd favorite: “Our Aurora design is another of our most successful floral prints, especially loved in the Green colorway. Deriving originally from an archival print, it has been freshly recolored so that the final result reflects a more prevalent outlook,” say Moschino and Vergeylen.
Philip Jeffries
This season, Philip Jeffries reminds us that floral doesn’t have to mean feminine. The brand’s spring collection, Art Decade, includes the Deco Hemp wallcovering line, which pairs the luxury of art deco with organic curves, uniting hard and soft through metal and hemp.
The story: The Deco Hemp collection nudges the art deco movement into the future with geometric shapes, clean lines and surprising material mixes.
Plant process: The simplicity of the Deco Hemp design belies its intricate construction, which integrates authentic handwoven hemp. Once the material is woven, it is sliced into shapes and hand-laid in a braided, tulip-like pattern atop a metallic gold or silver base.
Soane Britain
This London-based brand seems to do it all—custom furniture, rattan, upholstery, lighting, fabrics—and wallpapers. As a part of its spring collection, Soane Britain will debut Seraphic Star—a plucky patterned wallpaper made of perfectly imperfect starbursts framed in scalloped edges.
The story: The creative team at Soane Britain drew inspiration from a late-18th-century chafarcani cotton quilt from the personal collection of founder and creative director Lulu Lytle. The term describes a simple woodblock-printed fabric that came to the South of France by way of trade with India and the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century.
Vive la couleur: Seraphic Star’s four colorways also hint at the design’s French inspiration.
Homepage image: Courtesy of Graham & Brown
