Storybook Papers

This quirky scene is drawn from a printed 1930s fabric found at Tyntesfield, an exquisite country house in North Somerset, which was home to the Gibbs family for more than 150 years.

The pattern was made into slip covers for furniture in the children’s nursery. Featuring a polar bear and penguins alongside an elephant and an ostrich, the playful design is rich in imagination and has translated effortlessly into a surface-printed wallpaper pattern in a range of confident colourways.

The dogs in this design are Beatrix Potter’s doodled portraits of her beloved working collies, Nip and Lassie. The original sketches are tiny but effortlessly translate into a light-hearted wallpaper design, in which the accompanying sheep have been flocked to bring extra surface texture.

Beatrix was known for her dedication to farming, and in particular her award-winning stock of Herdwick sheep which also feature in the design. The breed is synonymous with the Lake District and Potter’s beloved rural cottage, Hill Top, where she famously settled and fervently pursued her creative and business endeavours.

The naïve line quality in this design accurately references the pair of vintage, mechanical apple-picking toys that inspired it. They are small pieces amongst a huge collection of mostly twentieth century artefacts now cared for by the National Trust at The Hardmans’ House in Rodney Street, Liverpool.

An elegant Georgian property, it is authentically preserved in its 1950s state having served as both home and busy photographic studio for the prestigious portrait photographer Edward Chambré Hardman and his wife, business partner and fellow photographer, Margaret.

Four framed motifs make up this design, each one originally the subject of a small set of wooden balancing games located at Greys Court in Oxfordshire.

In the games, a steady hand is required to locate tiny metal ball-bearings in the holes, and although the balls themselves have been omitted from the design, the locations of the holes have been retained in reference to its origin.

Another quirk is the rainbow’s inverted colour spectrum - it would correctly show the red on the outside and blue (or violet) on the inside, but is another original detail retained in the wallpaper pattern.

The former servants’ wing at Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire is now home to the National Trust’s ‘Children’s Country House’. Created with, and for, children of all ages, it is a place where nostalgic childhoods of yesterday are conserved, shared and celebrated.

This jolly pattern comprises sketches of a selection of vintage toy cars and trucks, cared for by the Trust; notably at Sudbury but also Nuffield Place, Tyntesfield and Wightwick Manor, amongst others. Aficionados will identify a 1951 Morris Minor, a wooden 1960s Mercedes truck and a glamorous Austin Atlantic from 1956.

A magical scene which directly references a variety of individual drawings and paintings from the unpublished sketchbooks of Beatrix Potter. Besides her irrepressible appetite for farming the land, Potter was a prolific and accomplished artist, fascinated and inspired by the nature that surrounded her rural home, Hill Top in Ambleside, Cumbria.

The animals featured in this design were all originally painted by the children’s illustrator Cecil Aldin. A founding member of the London Sketch Club, Aldin was known for his cartoonish animal depictions, and was published alongside literary works by Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, amongst others.

A children’s bedroom at Wightwick Manor in the West Midlands features a frieze which includes several of Aldin’s farm animals, including a mother hen with her chicks and a playful line of running ducks.

Striped fabrics and wallpapers have long been used to bring simple, refined pattern and elegant, effortless colour combinations to grand and humble interiors alike.

In Georgian and Regency times, this generously proportioned stripe would have been used more frequently in large rooms and amongst bold colours and strong patterns.

In contemporary interior design, wide stripes are still used to balance pattern, but have taken on more usability by virtue of the more relaxed, coordinating colour palette in which they are now available.