The wall is the largest surface in any room, and most interiors leave it empty. Cole & Son has spent since 1875 making the case for the opposite. The British design house treats the wall as the element a room is built around rather than the backdrop it happens in front of, and the difference between a painted wall and one of its papers is not decoration. It is the whole register of the space.
Craft you can see from across the room
What separates a Cole & Son paper from a printed image is how it is made. The house still works with hand blocks and screen printing, and it holds an archive of some two thousand original woodblocks. Its founder developed a process using ground mica that gives paper a silk like lustre, still used today, and revived hand flocking, which raises a surface close to cut velvet. These are the techniques that make a paper change as the light moves across it, and they are visible from the doorway.
Botanicals, geometrics, and clouds
The range is genuinely wide: botanical prints and florals, stripes, geometric patterns, architectural ornament and panoramic murals that run across an entire wall. Some designs have never left production, among them Woods and Palm Jungle. Others come from outside the house entirely, drawn from the archive of the Milanese atelier Fornasetti, whose motifs Cole & Son has been printing since the 2000s. Nuvolette, from that collaboration, carries clouds across the walls and up over the ceiling. Suited equally to private residences, boutique hotels and high end commercial projects, these papers bring character and elegance to an interior rather than simply filling it.
Cole & Son at Maison Territo
Maison Territo is an authorized retailer of Cole & Son in Montreal. Wallpapers, panoramic murals and decorative fabrics can be seen together there, with a design team to help you build the combinations. A sample on a screen tells you nothing. A length unrolled in the showroom tells you everything. Come and see it in person, at Royalmount, Montreal.
