There are wallpaper houses with a signature, and there are wallpaper houses with an address book. Christopher Farr Cloth belongs, unmistakably, to the second kind.
Founded in London in 2000 by Michal Silver, together with Christopher Farr and Matthew Bourne, the company grew out of a rug business that had already spent a decade restoring rug-making to the status of fine art. Christopher Farr Cloth brought the same sensibility to fabric and, in time, to the wall. Rather than develop a house style of its own, it behaves more like a gallery: it seeks out the artists, designers and archives it admires, hands each a carefully considered palette and a print room, and lets them get on with it.
"Every design begins as a conversation with a collaborator, which is precisely why no two collections feel the same."
Kit Kemp is perhaps the best known of those collaborators, and her Firmdale hotels have long been a masterclass in fearless, happy colour. At Ham Yard, her One Way sends broad painted chevrons racing up the walls in a custom green and mimosa, and the effect is of a room assembled over years rather than decorated in a week. Scott Yetman, a Canadian designer with a cooler, more graphic eye, takes another line entirely. His Brome Stripe lays wide tonal bands over a finely textured surface, here in a hot pink that would bring any guest bedroom smartly to attention.
Brome Stripe, Scott Yetman
Bulu Raffia, Moss
One Way, Kit Kemp
Fathom, Christopher Farr
A Gathering of Artists
It is when one turns to the artists, though, that the house really comes into its own. The Raoul Dufy collection draws on the archive of the French painter, whose textiles are every bit as spirited as his canvases. La Jungle sends elephants and leopards loping through tropical foliage, while Belle-de-Nuit shelters small birds among arching stems, and it was Dufy's pattern that the interior designer Peter Mikic chose as the starting point for his showroom installation, Colour Odyssey.
Olaf Hajek paints imagined worlds thick with flowers, birds and animals, and when Turner Pocock came to dress the King's Road showroom they began, tellingly, with his wallpapers, which they called the atmospheric foundation of the whole scheme. River of Joy was the one they reached for. Then there is the Fogo Island collection, made with the Fogo Island Workshops off the coast of Newfoundland, where wallpaper once served as insulation in unheated homes quite as much as decoration. Island Atmosphere, its watercolour hills set behind lines of tiny dots, is a quietly charming thing to find wrapped around a window seat.
La Jungle, Grass
Belle-de-Nuit, Raoul Dufy
River of Joy, Olaf Hajek
Island Atmosphere, Fogo Island
"A palette of recognisable, much-loved hues is the thread that ties so many different hands together."
Living with It
With so many voices under one roof, the most useful thing to know is that they share a palette. The cobalts, grasses, fuchsias and sky blues recur from one collection to the next, which means a Dufy will sit beside a Hajek far more happily than two papers from different houses ever could. For anyone inclined to layer pattern, that is a considerable gift, and the fabrics are designed to be used alongside.
Begin with the quieter papers. The Cloth Studio naturals, Bulu Raffia among them, are woven from real fibre and take colour a little unevenly, which lends a plain wall depth without making any demand on the eye. Then let a single artist take the lead: a whole room of River of Joy, perhaps, or Cactus Flower by Commune in a child's bedroom, its tall flowering cacti drawn with a light and sunny hand.
Bulu Raffia, Moss
River of Joy, Fig
Cactus Flower, Fuchsia
Island Atmosphere, Fogo Island
Do order a sample of whatever catches the eye. These are papers with an artist behind every one, and both the hand-drawn line and the natural weave are best judged in one's own light.
A wallpaper from Christopher Farr Cloth is never simply a pattern. It is an introduction, to a painter, a designer or a small island in the North Atlantic, and the room is all the better for the company.
