There is a particular test a room passes when it is very good indeed: you walk in, you feel instantly at ease, and you cannot immediately say why. Nothing shouts. There is no obvious feature wall demanding applause. And yet the space has depth and warmth and a sort of hush to it, the quality the fashion world learned to call quiet luxury before it wore the phrase out. More often than not, that feeling is coming from the walls, and from texture rather than pattern. This is the territory Mark Alexander has made its own.
The brand is one of six houses within the Romo Group, the British, family-run textile business now in its fifth generation, founded back in 1902. Where its siblings cover everything from bold colour to contemporary print, Mark Alexander occupies the calmest and arguably the most sophisticated corner of the family: naturally beautiful fabrics and wallcoverings, restrained rather than loud, that treat a wall as something to be sensed as much as seen.
Plait, Bark, Collage IV by Mark Alexander
Accent, Clay, Collage IV by Mark Alexander
"The best rooms are often the ones you feel before you notice. Mark Alexander decorates for exactly that moment."
What sets these papers apart is that they are, to an unusual degree, made of real things. The studio works in genuinely natural, botanical fibres: handwoven grasscloths, the ancient art of Japanese paper weaving, sisal laid down as a base and then finished with hand-stitched raffia. One of its designs, a woven sisal with raffia stitching, takes its cue from Japanese mending traditions such as Boro and Sashiko, the old and newly fashionable idea that a visible stitch can be beautiful in its own right. These are wallcoverings with a provenance you could almost describe as agricultural, entirely natural, sustainable and renewable, and it shows in the way they catch the light and change across a day.
Offset, Whitewash, Grasscloth Prints by Mark Alexander
Suru, Collage III by Mark Alexander
"Woven from grass, silk and paper, these are walls with a provenance you could almost call agricultural."
Tama, Paprika, Grasscloth Prints by Mark Alexander
Maze, Powder, Grasscloth Prints by Mark Alexander
Because the raw material is doing the work, colour here is a quiet business. The palette runs to the mellow and the earthy, bronze and ochre, oatmeal and stone, the greens and browns of a landscape rather than a paint chart, chosen to flatter the natural fibres rather than fight them. It is the sort of colouring that makes a room feel grounded and grown-up, and it has the happy side effect of being extraordinarily easy to live with. Nothing dates a room faster than a colour trying too hard; nothing ages more gracefully than a wall the colour of raw silk.
All of which makes Mark Alexander a particular kind of useful. A handwoven grasscloth is the most forgiving of luxuries, giving a plain wall genuine substance without committing it to a single motif you might tire of, which is why these papers are so at home in the rooms we want to feel considered rather than busy: a study, a principal bedroom, a dining room that should glow rather than dazzle. The tactile quality rewards being close to, so a hallway or a small room, where you brush past the walls and see them at arm's length, gets more from a woven paper than a large open space ever could. And because the interest is in the surface rather than the pattern, these designs layer beautifully with everything else, happy to be the quiet backdrop against which a good piece of furniture or a single bold textile can finally be heard.
Marelle, Jasper White, Collage IV by Mark Alexander
Riad, Iznik, Collage IV by Mark Alexander
Medina, Collage III by Mark Alexander
A word on the practicalities, because natural materials ask for a little more understanding than printed paper. Grasscloths and paper weaves are made by hand from living fibres, so slight variations in tone and texture between rolls are not flaws but the entire point, the mark of something woven rather than manufactured. It pays to hang them thoughtfully and, as ever, to order a sample first, not least because a photograph on a screen can tell you almost nothing about a material whose whole character is how it feels and how it holds the light.
There is a reason all of this feels so of the moment. After years in which walls grew steadily louder, competing to be the most photographed surface in the house, a good many of us have arrived at the same quiet conclusion: that the most luxurious thing a wall can do is simply feel wonderful and let everything else in the room breathe. Mark Alexander has been making precisely that case, in grass and silk and paper, for years. It turns out to have been ahead of us all along.
