Long before it was a wallpaper company, Harlequin was a character. In the travelling Italian theatre of the sixteenth century, the commedia dell'arte, the Harlequin was the nimble, quick-witted servant whose costume, stitched together from the scraps and offcuts the other players had thrown away, became a patchwork of brightly coloured diamonds. In time the word itself came to mean simply many-coloured, and it is hard to imagine a better name for the brand that took it on.
Founded as a British wallpaper company in 1960, and today one of the six quintessentially British houses within the Sanderson Design Group, Harlequin took that inheritance of colour and made it the entire point. Where its distinguished stablemates, Sanderson and Morris & Co among them, tend the great archives of English design, Harlequin was always the bold, contemporary one: quick to seize on a new idea, among the first in the industry to embrace digital printing, and never happier than with a full and fearless palette.
"The word harlequin came to mean, simply, many-coloured. The brand has spent decades living up to it."
The Serious Business of Joy
It would be easy to mistake all that colour for frivolity. Harlequin does not. The brand holds, quite seriously, that colour is among the most powerful tools in decorating, bound up with mood, with wellbeing and with the way we express who we are, and it has gone further than most to prove the point, even commissioning academic colour scientists to examine why the right palette can lift a room and the people standing in it. This is colour treated not as a finishing touch but as the main event.
That conviction shows in the company it keeps. Its collaboration with the designer and broadcaster Sophie Robinson, known to a devoted following as the queen of colour, is entirely of a piece with a brand whose stated mission is to give people the confidence to use colour and mean it. The designs themselves are big, optimistic and unafraid: large-scale florals, graphic geometrics and the kind of imaginative metallic and textured finishes that catch the light and rather refuse to be ignored.
Woodland Floral, Sophie Robinson for Harlequin, in her own kitchen
Wonderland Floral, Sophie Robinson for Harlequin, in her own bedroom
"Harlequin treats colour as a serious business: the quickest way to change how a room, and everyone in it, feels."
Learning to Be Braver
Here is why this matters just now. After the better part of a decade in which the safe, greige room reigned supreme, the mood has swung decisively back towards colour, character and a little joy, what the trend forecasters have taken to calling dopamine decor. Harlequin, as it happens, has been ready and waiting the whole time.
Transverse, Momentum 7 by Harlequin
Oscillation, Momentum 7 by Harlequin
The trick to using it is to begin with a colour rather than a pattern: the shade that genuinely makes you happy, the one your eye keeps returning to, and to build the room outward from there. A bold Harlequin print makes a fine starting point, its palette handing you a ready-made scheme to draw the rest of the room from.
Zenith, Pine/Seaglass, Zamora by Harlequin
Paisley, Seaglass, Zamora by Harlequin
Be braver than feels natural in the spaces that can take it, a downstairs cloakroom, a hallway, a child's bedroom, where a jolt of colour is pure pleasure and nothing is irreversible. And keep those innovative finishes in mind for the rooms you want to feel a little special, because a wall that shifts and glimmers as you pass does something no flat colour ever can.
Wood Blocks, Kasuri Ash and Taupe Gloss by Harlequin
Sumi, Linen and Indigo, Colour by Harlequin
Elsworthy, Moss, Henry Holland for Harlequin
As always, colour is the thing a screen most reliably lies about, so order a sample and live with it on the wall for a few days, in daylight and lamplight both, before committing. Happily, most Harlequin papers are non-woven and paste-the-wall, which makes putting your newfound bravery into practice a good deal easier than it looks.
Ajal, Sky, Zamora fabric by Harlequin
Cintilla, Evergreen/Spice, Zamora fabric by Harlequin
Blenets Check, Chocolate, Henry Holland for Harlequin fabric
Wiggle, Sophie Robinson for Harlequin
For a brand that borrowed its name from a figure dressed in every colour at once, none of this is a reinvention. Harlequin has simply been waiting, patiently and rather colourfully, for the rest of us to remember that a room is allowed to make us smile.
Ready to Bring Colour Into Your Home?
Browse the full Harlequin wallpaper and Harlequin fabric collections, or order a sample first to see how a colour actually behaves in your own light. If you want to keep the colour going, Harlequin's brighter, more contemporary Sanderson Design Group sibling, Scion, is well worth a look too.
