What is a figurative wallpaper?
A figurative wallpaper has a motif you can point at and name. A tree, a bird, an arcade, a flying machine. That sets it apart from the two other great families of pattern: the botanical, where foliage repeats into a surface, and the geometric, where the pattern is built on pure form.
The distinction is not academic, it decides how the room works. A botanical or geometric pattern is read by the eye as a texture — you stop registering it after a minute or so. A figurative pattern is read by the eye as a picture, over and over again. That is the whole point of it, and at the same time the only thing you need to think about before you put it up.
Which figurative wallpapers does Brittfurn carry?
Thirty-nine patterns, thirty-three of them from Cole & Son. That a single house should dominate so clearly is no accident: Cole & Son was founded in Islington in 1875 by John Perry and holds an archive of some 1 800 block-printed patterns, with customers including Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. Where an archive runs that deep, you find the odd, storytelling patterns as well.
Fornasetti at Cole & Son
Thirteen of the patterns come out of Cole & Son’s collaboration with the Milanese atelier Fornasetti, which began in 2008. Piero Fornasetti (1913–1988) decorated more than thirteen thousand objects in his lifetime, and his son Barnaba carries the atelier on. Among the patterns we hold are Procuratie, the arcades of St Mark’s Square in Venice, Nuvolette with its etched cloudscapes, and Macchine Volanti with flying machines that never left the ground.
If you would like to see the collaboration in full, wallpapers and accessories alike, it is gathered under Fornasetti.
Seville — Andalusia in print
Eight patterns come from Cole & Son’s Seville collection, which takes its language from southern Spain: Alcazar Gardens with the birds of the palace gardens, Flamenco Fan, Talavera after the Spanish faience tradition, and Hispalis, the Roman name for the city. The whole collection sits under Seville.
Architecture, birds and revelry
Beyond the two large groups there are patterns that are harder to categorise and often all the more enjoyable for it. Versailles and Villandry draw French palace gardens from a bird’s-eye view. Pavo Parade and Winter Birds are bird patterns in two entirely different registers. Cabaret and Cocktails belong where the evening is meant to be felt. Celestial Dragon from Osborne & Little and Royal Oak from Lewis & Wood stand entirely on their own.
For the children’s room
Sanderson’s Treasure Map and Fairy Castle are the two patterns in the collection drawn for children. Both are painted rather than drawn, which means they age better than you might expect — a Bambi pattern in watercolour can stay on the wall long after the child has stopped being a child.
Where does a figurative wallpaper work best?
In rooms you pass through, or sit still in. It sounds like a contradiction, but it amounts to the same thing: figurative patterns are at their best where the eye either sweeps past or is given plenty of time.
The hallway is the classic answer. You are there for thirty seconds at a time, and a pattern that would have been too much in the living room is exactly right there. The dining room is the second: subdued lighting, long sittings, and a pattern that bears being looked at between courses. The guest cloakroom is the third, and the room where you can be bolder than anywhere else — nobody lives in it.
In the living room figurative patterns work too, but as a feature wall rather than across all four walls. In the bedroom they are harder: a motif you can recognise is a motif you can lie and look at when it is three in the morning. The exception is the children’s room, where that is precisely the intention.
How do you choose the right figurative wallpaper?
Start with the repeat
The repeat is the distance before the pattern begins again. On figurative wallpapers it varies enormously — some patterns repeat every twenty centimetres, others are close to murals and have only a single repeat across an entire wall. A large-scale pattern in a small room becomes a piece of wallpaper, not a pattern. The measurements are given on every product page.
Think about the light
Figurative patterns often have dark grounds, and dark grounds eat daylight. In a north-facing room, a pattern that looked elegant in the shop can turn heavy by three o’clock on a November afternoon. If the room has limited light, move towards the lighter colourways or towards patterns with air between the motifs.
One wall or all four
The rule that tends to hold: the more narrative the pattern, the less surface it needs. An arcade pattern such as Procuratie can wrap a whole room because the repeat is regular. A pattern with distinct scenes would rather have one wall and let the other three stay quiet.
See the wallpaper on your own wall before you order
Scale is what goes wrong most often, and it is precisely what a product photograph cannot show. From the product page you reach the visualisation, where you upload a photograph of the room and see the pattern at the right size on your own wall. It requires logging in, but the room is then saved, so you can compare several patterns against one another at your leisure.
If you would like to see the print close up — and with figurative patterns the detail is half the pleasure — the full range is in our showroom at Sturegatan 20 in Stockholm. You can also see the wallpaper in your own room using the visualisation on the product page when you are logged in, or get in touch if you would like help choosing. See all our wallpapers as well.
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