The blank white wall is on its way out, and few of us will mourn it. For years it was the safe default, the thing you did when you could not decide, but the appetite now is for something with more to say: walls that are painterly, textured, a little theatrical, closer to a piece of art than a backdrop. Designers have begun using the phrase "gallery wall" in a more literal sense than they used to mean it, thinking of the wall itself as the work rather than the thing you hang work upon. It is one of the more freeing shifts in decorating for a decade, and it happens to be something the Dutch have understood for a very long time.
This is, after all, the country of Vermeer and Rembrandt, of light falling just so across a plastered room, of interiors painted with such tenderness that four hundred years later we still want to climb inside them. The Netherlands has always treated the wall as a surface worth composing. Nowhere is that inheritance more alive than at Eijffinger, a Dutch house that has spent almost a century and a half being cleverer, and braver, about pattern than most of its rivals.
Its beginnings are worth dwelling on. In 1875, Anna Eijffinger and her husband Theo opened a shop selling embroidery and wallpaper in The Hague, directly across from the Royal Palace Noordeinde. It was Anna who ran it, which was close to unheard of for a woman of the period, and it is tempting to trace the brand's whole character back to her: independent, a little contrary, unbothered by what a wallpaper was supposed to look like. Within a year the couple had abandoned the embroidery and given themselves over entirely to walls. Nearly a hundred and fifty years on, Eijffinger still draws its designs in its own Dutch studio and still prints in the Netherlands, and it still describes itself, rather wonderfully, as a house of outspoken wallpaper.
Seventies Floral, Pink, Groovy by Eijffinger
Nostalgic Evergreen, Red, Groovy by Eijffinger
Retro Palms, Green, Groovy by Eijffinger
Where the paintings come off the wall and onto it
If there is a single object that explains Eijffinger, it is the Magnifique collection, and the story behind it is the kind decorating rarely offers. A short walk from that first shop stands the Mauritshuis, the jewel-box museum that holds Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and the great seventeenth-century landscapes of Jacob van Ruisdael. For the first time in the museum's history, it handed some of those paintings to Eijffinger's designers, who studied them at very close range, pulling out the details most visitors never notice: the craquelure, the buried blues and golds, the way a Golden Age painter built a colour up in layers. Some of what they found was reproduced almost faithfully, soft and painterly; some was abstracted into pattern so completely that you would never guess its origin. The result is, quite literally, seventeenth-century art rehung as a twenty-first-century wall, and it makes the case for wallpaper-as-art more persuasively than any manifesto could.
Diamond, Red, Festival by Eijffinger
Abstract Waves, Blue, Festival mural by Eijffinger
The instinct runs through the brand's Museum collection too, which mines fine art and architecture for the same gallery mood and has become, unsurprisingly, one of Eijffinger's most enduring sellers. There is a particular pleasure in a room that carries that museum hush, and these are the papers that deliver it. Hang one as you would a painting, somewhere you pass often, and give it the wall to itself.
Paisley Patches, Sage, Amber by Eijffinger
Jacobean, Sage, Amber by Eijffinger
Paisley Patches, Olive, Amber by Eijffinger
The brand also knows how to have fun
It would be a mistake, though, to file Eijffinger under reverent. Its other great talent is sheer joy, and its more exuberant collections are a tonic after a decade of careful greige. The long partnership with the Amsterdam studio Pip Studio has produced some of the most cheerful florals in the business; the Festival collection deals in tropical greens and unapologetic colour; Groovy leans, knowingly, into a warm seventies flamboyance. Bold pattern of this kind rewards conviction rather than caution. It falters when it is applied in a timid strip and comes alive when you commit to it, which is why the downstairs cloakroom, papered floor to ceiling in something loud, remains one of the great low-risk indulgences in any house. A small room asks so little of you that there is really no reason to be shy in it.
Ornaments, Terracotta, Amber by Eijffinger
Majestic Garden, Jade, Amber mural by Eijffinger
What is less expected, given all that colour, is how good Eijffinger is at restraint. One of the defining moods of the moment is texture over pattern, the idea that a room can feel rich and considered through surface alone, and here the brand has a long head start. It has always made a signature of embossing, of fine grooves and woven effects that give a paper genuine depth and a finish you want to run a hand across. The Woven Canvas, Linen Look and Scandi Canvas designs are the quiet stars of this: from across a room they read as beautiful natural cloth, warming a space without a single busy motif, which makes them the obvious choice for a bedroom or a wall you want to feel calm rather than loud. When a little more glamour is called for, the Gilded collection brings an Art Deco polish and a soft metallic light that shifts and glows as the day moves around the room, most flatteringly of all by lamp in a dining room at night.
Plain Texture, Mauve, Linen Look by Eijffinger
Plain Texture, Rose, Linen Look by Eijffinger
Abstract Palm, Silver Grey, Gilded by Eijffinger
Part of what makes all of this so usable is that the palette stretches the entire distance, from the faded terracottas and sands of the Magnifique papers to deep emeralds and moody, colour-drenched darks, so the more sensible course is to settle on a mood before a design and let the paper set it. A characterful Eijffinger wallpaper rarely wants an argument from the rest of the room in any case; give it a quiet floor, simple furniture and good light, and it will happily be the thing everyone remembers. It helps, too, that most of these papers are printed on a non-woven backing, which means you paste the wall rather than the paper, a cleaner and far more forgiving job that makes even the bolder designs surprisingly friendly to hang yourself. As ever, a sample seen on your own wall, in your own light, will tell you more than any screen, and with colours and textures this considered it is worth the wait.
There is something fitting in the fact that a brand born opposite a royal palace, in the city of the Old Masters, should still be the one arguing hardest that a wall deserves to be looked at. After a long stretch of playing it safe, a great many of us have quietly come round to the same view.
