In 1976, a young English designer named Anna French did something that now sounds almost impossibly romantic. With her husband John she left London for a disused Victorian lace mill in Scotland and set about, of all the then-unfashionable things, making lace. The venture took the better part of two decades to find its audience, but the instinct behind it never wavered, and Scottish lace remains in the collection to this day.
That beginning explains everything that followed. Long before it was a wallpaper house, this was a business built on fine thread and intricate pattern, on the pleasure of the closely worked and the barely there. It is the thread, quite literally, that runs through every Anna French design: a fineness of line, a lightness of touch, a fondness for the motif that only gives itself up on closer inspection.
"Long before it was a wallpaper house, Anna French made lace. That fineness has never left the work."
An unlikely transatlantic match
Some years ago the brand crossed the Atlantic and into rather grander company. It now belongs to Thibaut, the oldest wallpaper house in America, founded in a New York back room in 1886 and marking its hundred and fortieth birthday this year. On paper it is an odd couple, a small British maker of delicate prints and a venerable American institution whose papers have turned up everywhere from the White House to Hollywood film sets. In practice the match flatters both. Within the Thibaut stable Anna French is the romantic, the one with the English accent and the lighter hand, and the arrangement has carried her designs onto an international stage without blunting a single delicate edge.
The confidence of the quiet room
For the best part of a decade the fashionable wall has been a loud one: inky, drenched, maximal, forever auditioning for a photograph. It made for wonderful magazine covers and rather exhausting rooms. The mood is turning now, and the interiors that feel freshest are the ones brave enough to be light. Which is precisely why Anna French rewards a second look, because delicacy is the thing it has always done best.
Willow Tree, Beige, by Anna French
Sussex Hydrangea, Soft Gold, Bristol by Anna French
Its designs are the fine leaf trail, the sprigged floral, the botanical drawn with a botanist's patience rather than a decorator's swagger. A pattern such as Frondescence, all trailing foliage, lends a room the greenish calm of a garden glimpsed through a window; a small-scale sprig papered wall to wall wraps a bedroom in something soft rather than shouted. The Palampore collection, named for the hand-painted Indian cotton panels that so beguiled Georgian England, shows the same appetite for the intricate. These are papers that let the light in rather than swallowing it, which is exactly why they make a small or north-facing room feel as though it has finally taken a breath.
Woodland, Green on Natural, Bristol by Anna French
Campania Paisley, Sage, Belvedere by Anna French
"Delicate pattern lets the light in rather than swallowing it, which is why it makes a small room breathe."
There is cleverness, too, in how accommodating a delicate design is. A fine floral will sit quite happily behind a heavy Victorian chest or a strong piece of art without any of them squabbling for attention, which makes it an unusually good foundation for a room full of the things you actually love. Not that Anna French only whispers. The bolder chinoiseries and the more graphic designs have real presence and know how to hold a hallway or a dining room; the art is simply to match the pattern to the ambition of the room.
Holly Trellis, Sage, Belvedere by Anna French
Garden Club, Blue, Belvedere by Anna French
A word on the practical side. The papers are drawn in London and mostly printed on a non-woven backing, so you paste the wall rather than the paper, which is a good deal less trying for anyone hanging it themselves. And since a screen does no justice at all to fineness of line or subtlety of colour, order a sample and give it a few days on the wall before deciding. With patterns this quiet, the eye needs a moment to notice what it is being given.
Farmingdale, Green, Belvedere by Anna French
Ribbon Sisal, Navy, Belvedere by Anna French
Lindsey, Soft Gold, Bristol by Anna French
Trefolia Velvet, Paprika, Camelot by Anna French
For a house that began with a length of Scottish lace, none of this is a change of direction. It is simply the original idea, waiting with some patience for the rest of us to come round to it again.
