It is one of the great ironies of British decoration that the wallpaper we now reach for when we want a room to feel safe, settled and reassuringly traditional was the work of a genuine radical. William Morris, born in 1834, was a designer, certainly, but also a poet, a publisher, an environmental campaigner and a committed socialist who spent his later years agitating, quite literally, for revolution. When the Poet Laureateship came within reach after Tennyson's death, the establishment came calling; Morris, who had rather bigger plans for society, was not interested.
His firm was itself an act of rebellion. Disillusioned by the shoddy, machine-made goods flooding Victorian homes, Morris founded what became Morris & Co in 1861 on a then-heretical idea: that things should be made properly, by hand, by people who took pleasure in the making, and that beauty was not a luxury for the rich but something everyone deserved. He urged his contemporaries to keep nothing in their homes that they did not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. It was less a decorating tip than a manifesto.
"Britain's most comforting wallpaper was designed by a man who wanted to overturn Victorian society."
Drawn from the garden
For all the politics, what has kept Morris on our walls is the sheer, patient beauty of the patterns, and the secret to those is that he did not really invent them. He observed them. A keen gardener and an obsessive student of the natural world, Morris took his designs from the hedgerows and the plants outside his own window. Strawberry Thief, perhaps the best loved of all, came from watching thrushes raid the fruit netting in his kitchen garden at Kelmscott Manor; the willow boughs, the acanthus, the honeysuckle and the marigolds that fill the rest of the archive were all studied from life before being coaxed, by hand, onto a printing block.
"His patterns were never invented so much as observed, which is why they have never once looked dated."
That rootedness in real nature is precisely why the designs have aged so gracefully. A pattern taken from a living willow cannot easily go out of fashion, because the willow never does. It is biophilic design, as the trend forecasters would now have it, more than a century before anyone thought to coin the term.
Morris & Co, Willow Bough
Morris & Co, Fruit
Why it never dates, and why it suits now
The proof is in the endurance. Strawberry Thief has been in continuous production for over 140 years, which makes it perhaps the least trend-dependent purchase in all of decorating. The firm passed to Arthur Sanderson & Sons in 1940, bought, wonderfully, for all of four hundred pounds, and today sits within the Sanderson Design Group, whose archive guards Morris's original logbooks and a sample of every paper the company ever made. New collections are drawn faithfully from those documents and still printed in Britain, frequently recoloured for the modern room.
Morris & Co, Pure Honeysuckle & Tulip
Morris & Friends, Leicester
It is hard to think of a designer whose moment has come round more emphatically. Morris's whole creed, craftsmanship over disposability, nature over the synthetic, beauty made to last and to be shared, reads today less like Victorian idealism than like a checklist for how a great many of us now want to live.
Using it is a pleasure precisely because there is so much range within the one archive. Reach for a dark, saturated Acanthus or Pimpernel where you want enveloping drama, in a dining room or a study lit by lamplight, and for a softer, freshly recoloured print where you want calm; both belong as happily in a new-build flat as in a Victorian terrace, and both look wonderful against plain painted woodwork that lets the pattern breathe. As ever, colour and scale read more truthfully on your own wall than on any screen, so order a sample before committing.
Morris & Co fabric, Marigold
Morris & Co, Honeysuckle & Tulip
Morris & Co fabric, Honeysuckle
For a man who dreamed of putting beauty into every home, there is a certain justice in the fact that, more than a century later, his patterns have done precisely that. The radical, it turns out, won.
Ready to bring Morris & Co into your home?
Browse the full Morris & Co wallpaper collection and its matching fabrics at Wallpaper Sales, and order a sample before you commit, colour and scale are everything with a pattern this rich, and neither one reads true on a screen.
