Scenic Wallpaper

Scenic wallpapers, each one a place: pagodas beside water on cream, a sage-green river map with rowers and a stone bridge, stags under an oak on pale mint, a pink landscape of palms and low cottages, swallows over banked white cloud. They're views, not motifs. They do still repeat, though.

Choosing scenic wallpaper

Where it works

A scene wants distance. Give it a wall you can read from the far side of the room, say the end of a hallway, the wall facing the bed, a dining room or a stairwell. Sky Swallows and Stone Swallow push a room outward, all banked cloud. River Map goes the other way. Hundreds of tiny figures, boats and a bridge on parchment, so it belongs in a downstairs loo or a study, somewhere people stand close and go looking for things. Stag Woodland is engraved in one green on pale mint. Quiet enough to sleep beside. The Tiger Magnolia mural is another matter: it prints as one continuous image and needs a whole wall to itself.

Picking between the designs

Sort them by how they're drawn. The engraved single-colour scenes are the toile group, Pagoda Toile in cobalt on cream with Stag Woodland and Pagoda Garden next to it. Silhouettes come next. Indigo Lakeside cuts rowers, swimmers and a striped parasol in navy against pale blue water, and Swallow Flight is done the same way. Palm Cottage (dusty pink) and Teal Songbird (on grey plaster) are painted, and so are the two maps, River Map and Village Map. In Sky Swallows, Night Clouds and Grey Cloud the subject is really the weather. One practical point. Toiles and silhouettes use two colours, so matching paint to them is easy, while the painted scenes bring four or five and will lead the room whatever else is in it.

Related

The engraved scenes are in toile wallpaper too. Pagodas turn up in chinoiserie wallpaper and the swallows in bird wallpaper, and What is toile tells where the scenic toile came from.