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.
The effect depends on more than the pattern itself. Texture, sheen and the way light falls across a wall can all change the appearance of a design throughout the day. These details are particularly important when choosing wallpaper for a room with large windows, layered lighting or a combination of natural materials.
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.
The choice of pattern also influences how wallpaper interacts with the rest of a room. Botanical prints can introduce a natural, layered feel, while stripes and geometric designs bring rhythm and structure. Panoramic murals create a more immersive effect, particularly when their composition extends across a large surface.
Rather than matching every element, wallpaper can establish a visual direction for the room. Furniture, lighting, textiles and decorative objects can then be selected to complement its colours, shapes or overall mood.
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.
