Abstract Wallpaper

Choosing abstract wallpaper

Where it works

We'd hang an abstract wherever a floral would look lost, like a modern living room, a study or a hall with a concrete floor. Lavender Sweep is soft enough for a bedroom, periwinkle petals with flecks of gold, and so is Washed Squares. Painted Bridges isn't soft at all. Neither is Tiger Strokes. Give one of them a single wall behind the sofa or the bed and stop there. Bathroom, cloakroom? Ink waves. Black Wave, Rolling Waves and Ink Surf are pattern without colour.

Picking between the designs

Look at how each mark was made and the collection splits up fast. Most of it is brushwork. You can see the drag in Rolling Surf, burnt orange pulled through aubergine, and in the pink and mustard peaks of Painted Bridges. The waves are ink instead, hatched swells stacked row on row. Jewel Terrazzo wasn't drawn so much as scattered, chips of fuchsia and emerald thrown across midnight navy, and Leopard Confetti works the same way. Then the scissors. Portrait Collage and Bouquet Silhouette are cut-paper figures and vases in black and white, packed so tight that almost no ground shows. Nothing we print is more graphic. Retro Figures won't sit in any group (screen-printed people, orange on jade green, half abstract and half story), and we like it for that. Still stuck? Count the colours. One for the waves, three for Lavender Sweep, five for Jewel Terrazzo.

Related

Straight edges live over in geometric wallpaper. The wetter, runnier designs are in watercolor wallpaper, and the 1950s shapes have a page of their own, mid-century modern wallpaper.