There is a particular kind of room that has been quietly gathering admirers. It is not loud, exactly, but it is far from beige. The walls carry pattern, the curtains have weight, and somewhere, on a cushion, a lampshade or the back of a chair, there is a creature, or a flower, or a fragment of some older design that you find yourself wanting to look at twice. After a decade in which interiors leaned cool, grey and carefully blank, the mood of 2026 has tipped decisively the other way: towards warmth, texture and rooms that feel as though they have a memory. It is, when you look closely, a thoroughly British instinct: the layered, pattern-rich, gently imperfect rooms this country has always done best, coming back into their own. And if there is one name that has been making that case all along, it is a homegrown one.
That name is Lewis & Wood, one of the great British houses in fabric and wallpaper. Founded in 1993 by the textile printer Stephen Lewis and the decorator Joanna Wood, and steered today with creative director Magdalen Jebb, the company has spent three decades earning a reputation as the designer's designer, the brand interiors people reach for when they want pattern that feels collected rather than bought. What makes it special is how genuinely homegrown the whole thing is: every design is conceived and printed in-house at Woodchester Mill in Gloucestershire, a thoroughly modern operation tucked inside a very English valley, where British craft and digital printing combine to do the thing they are best known for: wide-width wallpaper, printed in a single generous run so that a large design can sweep across a wall without an interrupting seam.
Now the full range of Lewis & Wood wallpaper and fabric has joined us at Wallpaper Sales, and if you have been waiting for an excuse to bring a little more character home, consider this it. Below, our guide to decorating with one of Britain's best loved design houses.
Otomi Leafy, Lewis & Wood
Begin with a pattern that has a story
The first thing to understand about Lewis & Wood is that almost nothing is invented from nothing. The studio draws on embroideries, archive documents, folk art and the collections of museums including the V&A, then reworks what it finds into something unmistakably its own. The result is pattern with provenance: designs that reward a second glance because there is genuinely something to discover.
Take Otomi, the design on the long bolster cushion in our main image. It began life as a Mexican embroidery tradition full of exotic creatures and birds of paradise; Lewis & Wood reimagined it as an English woodland, populating the linen with hares, deer and birds. For those who know the back catalogue, it even slips in butterflies borrowed from Adam's Eden, the swallow from Windrush and a tiny wren from Floreat. It is the sort of detail that makes a room feel personal rather than off-the-shelf, and it works as beautifully as a single statement cushion as it does run across a whole wall.
If you do only one thing, choose a design you actually want to live alongside, and let the rest of the scheme follow it.
Let the wallpaper and fabric talk to each other
One of the great pleasures of a house that prints both papers and cloth is that the two can be made to rhyme. Many Lewis & Wood designs exist as matching wallpaper and fabric, which opens up the most satisfying decorating trick there is: paper a wall in a print, then echo it, exactly or in a quieter relation, on a blind, a headboard or a set of curtains.
The instinct to "match" can feel old-fashioned, but done with restraint it reads as confidence. The trick is to vary the scale and the surface. A bold wide-width paper on the walls wants a calmer companion in the room, a textured weave, a simple stripe or a tonal plain, rather than the same motif at the same volume everywhere you look. In our image, the painterly Otomi linen is grounded by softly striped and crinkled greens behind it; nothing competes, and the whole thing settles.
Windrush White, Lewis & Wood
Toile Baptiste Ciel, Lewis & Wood
Use wide-width paper where ordinary paper gives up
Wide-width wallpaper is the format that made Lewis & Wood's name, and it earns its keep in exactly the places standard rolls struggle. Because the designs are printed large and seam-free, they suit the walls you want to make an event of: a hallway, a stairwell, a chimney breast, the wall behind a bed. A big, generous pattern that would feel busy in fragments instead becomes architectural, something closer to a mural than a wallcovering.
Hallways in particular are worth a moment's thought. They tend to be the rooms we under-decorate and over-apologise for, yet they set the tone for everything beyond. A confident paper here, and Lewis & Wood's are robust enough for a high-traffic space, does more for a house than almost any other single decision.
Paper Trail River, Lewis & Wood
Build the scheme around a colour, not a contrast
The Lewis & Wood palette is painterly and slightly faded, which is precisely why it sits so easily in an English room. Rather than reaching for sharp contrast, build a scheme around a single colour family and let it deepen and lift across the space.
Green is the obvious place to start in 2026, a colour designers keep returning to because it borrows its authority from the landscape and never feels like a trend. The room in our image is a quiet lesson in it: sage, sage-blue, soft olive and the gentle "green tea" of the Otomi cushion, all held together against a warm, chalky plaster wall and bare boards. Notice that there is no single "feature" colour fighting for attention; instead a dozen near-relations of green do the work, with cream and unbleached linen as the breathing space between them. It is a far more forgiving way to decorate than the high-contrast schemes of a few years ago, and a far cosier one to sit in.
Where to put it, room by room
Living rooms and snugs. A patterned paper on the chimney breast, picked up in cushions and a lampshade, gives a room its character without committing every wall. Otomi, with its woodland cast of characters, is made for the job.
Bedrooms. Wallpaper behind the bed, a matching or tonal blind at the window, and the room is finished. Softer colourways keep it restful.
Hallways and stairs. The place to be brave. Wide-width paper turns the most overlooked room in the house into the one guests remember.
Curtains and blinds. Lewis & Wood's printed linens hang beautifully; the same designs can be made up into curtains or Roman blinds, and our made-to-measure service takes care of the maths.
Pasha Marmara, Lewis & Wood
Pomegranate Fresco Sky, Lewis & Wood
Womad LG 100 Henna, Lewis & Wood
A note on shopping it well
Because these are printed-to-order, designer cloths and papers, two small habits make all the difference. First, order a sample before you commit: colour on a screen and colour on linen in your own light are rarely the same thing, and the painterly Lewis & Wood palette in particular shifts with the room. Second, if you are papering a tall wall, take advantage of the wide-width, pattern-matched format rather than fighting standard drops; it is what these designs were made for.
The full Lewis & Wood collection, fabrics and wallpapers with matching designs across both, is now available at Wallpaper Sales. It is, we think, exactly the kind of pattern this particular moment was asking for: warm, characterful, proudly British, and made to be lived with for a very long time.
Browse the complete Lewis & Wood collection at Wallpaper Sales, or order samples to find your colourway.
