A room has never needed colour, it has needed warmth, and chocolate has quietly become the easiest way to get there. Not one shade either. This month's edit runs to eleven finishes from ten different brands, and no two get there the same way: some are grasscloth, some are gloss, some are printed straight from a two-hundred-year-old archive and some are drawn fresh this year. What holds them together is the room they build rather than the pattern on the roll, brown as a backdrop that makes everything else in the space, art, timber, an old chair, look better than it did on white.
Grain Before Colour
Some of the best chocolate papers this season are not really about pattern at all. Wood Block Floral leans into a grasscloth ground before the print even registers, a small repeating floral pressed into genuine woven texture rather than a flat print trying to look textured. Espiguilla does something similar from the other direction: a raffia weave, eco certified, in a warm taupe brown that reads almost solid from across a room and only reveals its herringbone grain up close. Both are papers you feel as much as see, which is exactly the point chocolate makes better than almost any other colour.
Wood Block Floral, Grasscloth & Brown by Joules
Espiguilla, Brown by Coordonné
Straight From the Archive
Chocolate is also where the archive brands do their best work, because a two-hundred-year-old print was designed for exactly this kind of ground. Artichoke Bark takes one of Morris & Co's most recognisable Arts and Crafts prints and drops it into a rich brown colourway from the new Colours of Morris range, warmer and moodier than the ivory grounds it is usually shown in. Sandberg's Lake Como goes further back in spirit, a toile-style pattern of villas and hillside scenes that looks completely at home in a period bedroom, gilt mirror and all. Anna French's Chelsea in Bristol Chestnut and Clarke & Clarke's Paradise Lost Mythica in Sepia, designed with illustrator Emma J Shipley, both work the same territory in their own hand, one a florals-and-birds archive print, the other a darker, more fantastical botanical.
Artichoke Bark, Colours of Morris by Morris & Co
Lake Como, Brown by Sandberg
Pattern, Not Just Palette
The rest of the edit proves chocolate is not just a neutral standing in for beige. Golden Trellis turns it geometric, a diamond trellis in brown and gold from Boråstapeter's Treasured collection that reads almost jewellery-like against dark woodwork, with Hip Rose offering a softer, more floral alternative from the same Swedish house. Showtime Chestnut, from Brand McKenzie's Viva Vintage collection, takes the palette somewhere entirely different again: a tongue-in-cheek scene of animals at the cinema, proof that brown does not have to mean serious. Orly Mid Tone Timber, from Made, goes the other way entirely, a wallpaper built to read as genuine wood panelling rather than pattern at all. Beyond these four sit Douglas Plaid Brown from Thibaut and Bot Brown from Tres Tintas, both checked or plaid rather than floral, Henry Holland's graphic Edenfield and Harlequin's Brocha in its Zamora colourway, and Bloomsbury Petite in Conker from newcomers Parker & Jules, a bold hand-painted floral on a rich brown ground.
Golden Trellis, Brown by Boråstapeter
Showtime, Chestnut by Brand McKenzie
Orly, Mid Tone Timber Brown by Made
Grasscloth, toile and timber panelling all read differently once they're on a wall than they do on a swatch card, and a photograph under studio light will only tell you so much. Order a physical sample before committing a whole room, and check it against your own light at different times of day, chocolate tones especially can shift warmer or cooler than expected once they're up.
Ready to Bring Chocolate Home?
Browse the full chocolate wallpaper edit, filed under our new Shop by Colour pages, and order a sample from any product page via our Sample Service before you commit to a room.
