Block Print Wallpaper

Choosing block print wallpaper

Where it works

Block prints like a room that already has cloth in it. A quilt on the bed, kilims on the living-room floor, linen hanging at the kitchen window. Indigo Cardinal, a single bird on flax linen, is a bedroom paper, and so is Indigo Medallion. Denim Dash is the modern one, indigo strokes bunched into squares and little doorway shapes, we'd put it in a home office. Painted Dots is cobalt and pale denim circles in offset rows. Good in a nursery. Good in a bathroom. Then there's Topiary Urns, cream urns and clipped trees stacked in columns on black, the formal one (a hallway, or a dining room that wants to sit up straight).

Picking between the designs

Almost all of it is indigo on cream, so you're really choosing the mark. Some are small stamps, repeated. Indigo Medallion swaps florals with four-point stars, and Painted Dots and Stamped Blossom go with it. In others the marks pile up into shapes: Denim Dash, or Navy Coral, branching navy silhouettes packed close. Tiles are their own thing. Patchwork Tile sets diamonds on cream plaster and hand-blocks a different arabesque into each one; Navy Tiles flips it, cream medallions with notched edges on navy. Indigo Cardinal and Topiary Urns are the figures. Then the edges. The rougher they are, the more the wall reads as cloth, and Indigo Medallion and Painted Dots are the roughest of the lot, Navy Tiles the cleanest. Tangerine Blossom and Orange Geometric leave indigo behind.

Related

The indigo carries on in navy wallpaper and blue wallpaper, the tiles in geometric wallpaper. Block printing has a resist-dyed cousin, and What is an ikat pattern is where we wrote it up.