In the sixteenth century, the tea master Sen no Rikyu took what had been a lavish, almost competitive ritual among Japanese nobility and stripped it down to almost nothing: a room the size of a mat and a half, plain clay bowls in place of gold and porcelain, an entrance so narrow that everyone, however powerful, had to crawl through it to get in. He was not the first to make this argument. A Zen priest named Murata Juko had made a similar case a century earlier. But it was Rikyu who turned it into something like a philosophy: that beauty is not in the polished and the symmetrical, but in the humble, the worn and the quietly imperfect. The Japanese have two words for it, wabi and sabi, the first meaning a kind of austere, stripped back calm, the second the particular beauty an object gains as it ages. Five hundred years later, it is having a real moment in wallpaper.
Eight techniques, one philosophy
Wabi-sabi in interiors is a reaction to something specific: years of flawless, sprayed-on, endlessly repeatable finishes, and a growing sense that a wall with a bit of hand in it feels more honest than one that doesn't. Sandberg's new mural takes the idea literally and simply calls itself Wabi Sabi. Coordonné's new Shibori collection takes it further still: eight designs, each named for a different traditional Japanese dye or fold technique. Mokume, in Jute, is built on a folding technique worked in a domino sequence, giving it the quiet, layered grain of a piece of wood rather than a printed repeat. Yuki, in Cloud, uses a much narrower thread technique instead, leaving a trail as clean and linear as a line drawn in fresh snow. Neither is trying to look machine made, and neither is pretending to be something it isn't.
Mokume, Jute, Shibori by Coordonné
Yuki, Cloud, Shibori by Coordonné
The same hand at work, in a different key
Two more from the same collection make the case for hand-dyeing specifically, rather than folding or stitching. Itajime, in Amber, is dyed by hand before it is ever printed, so no two rolls line up exactly. That is not a flaw to be corrected in the next production run. It is, per the whole idea of wabi-sabi, the point. Miura, in Jute, uses the same hand-dyeing technique, just softened into a fluid stripe instead of Itajime's tighter grid, proof that one process can still read as two entirely different characters depending on how it's handled.
Itajime, Amber, Shibori by Coordonné
Miura, Jute, Shibori by Coordonné
Quiet is not the same as small
It would be easy to assume wabi-sabi only ever means muted and understated, but that misses half the philosophy. Hoshi, in Cloud, is a full mural built from the same linear stitching and pleating as the rest of the collection, only here it reads as bold and graphic, closer to a burst of light across the wall than anything restrained. Set beside it, Mark Alexander's Marelle, in Jasper White, makes the opposite argument just as convincingly: woven from hand-dyed Japanese paper yarn and knotted raffia rather than printed at all, so the variation you see wall to wall is simply what happens when a material this natural is worked by hand. Loud or quiet, both are honest about how they were made, and that honesty is really what wabi-sabi is asking for.
Hoshi, Cloud, Shibori mural by Coordonné
Marelle, Jasper White, Collage IV by Mark Alexander
How to bring it home without overhauling the whole room
None of this needs a full room to work. A single wall behind a bed or a desk gives a hand-worked textured wallpaper room to be noticed without asking the rest of the space to change with it, in much the same way Rikyu's tearoom made its point with almost nothing in it at all. Texture like this is also genuinely worth seeing in your own light before you commit to a full roll, since the depth that makes these designs interesting can read quite differently under a north facing window than it does on a product photo. Every design mentioned here can be ordered as a sample first for exactly that reason.
Ready to bring wabi-sabi into your home?
Explore our full range of textured and plain wallpaper for more designs built the same way, or order samples of any design from Coordonné's Shibori collection or Mark Alexander's Marelle directly from their product pages. Visit our sample service page to get started.
