Object of the day: New Eley Kishimoto wallpapers

Weeeeeell, if I can't write about eye-popping budget-stretching wallpaper during the London Design Festival, when else? (The event started this weekend and goes on until next Sunday.)

I'm a big fan of Eley Kishimoto clothes, and the print mad design duo's expanding homewares range excites me greatly. And it's not for the faint-hearted...

This is my favourite of the wallpaper designs that the brand – aka Mark Eley and Wakako Kishimoto – is launching at Decorex, which kicks off as LDF ends on Sunday.

Would you put it in your house?

It would really lift a room, for sure. I'm seeing it as the backdrop to a wall of white shelves, holding a disciplined display.

It also would look fantastic as the best feature wall/corner you'd ever seen, in an otherwise black-painted room, too (feature walls are back apparently, but I always favour a wall and a turn to mix things up a little).

The wallpaper range builds on these, which I wrote about when they exhibited them a few years back in an exhibition of them at the capital's Aram Store. Here's one of the other new designs.

Left: Mark Eley and Wakako Kishimoto

A very Eley Kishimoto take on a classic design. Again, with a crisp white theme around it, this would energise a room no end. I'd love to see it in a wide entrance hallway, with white-painted floorboards. The papers are going to be priced at £160 per roll.

But if you can't afford them, or don't have an interior that could accommodate such boldness, you can enjoy them – along with designs by many other interesting names – in an exhibition that runs until the end of October.

Above: Tracy Kendall and Louise Body, two of the designers whose work will appear at the London Print Studio exhibition

Designers on show at Artists' Interior Worlds include Lizzie Allen, whose Festival of Britain print you may remember from a few years back, when she was commissioned to create it in celebration of the Royal Festival Hall's 60th birthday (and you can still buy prints taken from it at the Southbank shop). There will also be work by Timorous Beasties, whose deviant urban Toile designs must surely be Britain's most popular gastropub loo wall covering. Also on show is Deborah Bowness, she of the fake wall of library books and CUSTHOM, digital embroidery meisters who I featured here. The Chapman brothers have created a design called ‘Insult to Injury’, which apparently "reworks Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ etchings to outrageous effect". Of course. All these, among a vast rollcall of more interesting names.

The exhibition, which aims to pit classical artists against contemporary designers, sounds totally brilliant. It runs until 1 November at Londonprintstudio.org.uk.

Introducing... Anna Chilton

First, the bad news: you can't buy Anna Chilton's beautiful drawings – on various ceramic items – and her striking print designs – on wallpapers, t-shirts and more – today.

The good news: you're getting the inside tip-off about this fresh talent early – and one day soon, when she's left art school – I know! – if not before, her stunning work will be in demand from retailers a-plenty. (Sharpen those elbows, buyers.)

I caught up with Anna, who is south London based and studying Surface Design at UAL’s London College of Communications, to find out a bit about her and about the inspiration for her work... as well as when we'll be able to get hold of some of her beautiful designs, especially these simply drawn, characterful animal portraits.

Let's start with the most important question: any chance we'll all be able to buy your designs some time soon?
Yes, I finish my degree in June and then the plan is to develop the ceramics collections and make steps to get them manufactured. I am looking to find a buyer for my ceramics so I can start getting them out there.

And meanwhile...?
I imagine I will work towards a market stall and online shop in time for Christmas so check the blog! [Link below.]

What inspires your gorgeous animal illustrations – the drawings are so full of character...
I first started drawing animals when I designed a range of cake tins. The designs were drawings of anthropomorphic Indian animals mixed with package design of the colonial era. It sounds weird when I say it like that so I better explain!

It started off as an interest in the beauty of the British/Indian colonial aesthetic and became more satirical as I learned more about the brutality of British Empire. I drew Queen Victoria as an elephant and a plantation owner with the head of a rhino [above]. I was surprised at how much character came though in the animal’s faces.

The Tiger mug [top three images] is from a set of three called Big Lazy Animal where all the animals used, instead of being scary, are all sleepy and a bit ridiculous.

Where did the inspiration for the pattern in your wallpaper come from (I wondered if it was a graphic reinvention of this photo)?
It was from my last show called Diamonds and Cloth. I do a lot of hand drawing and the wallpaper came from some drawings I did of crumpled cloth. It’s interesting how everyone sees something different in this particular piece.

How did both collections come about? 
The white ceramic animals were a college project and the tiger mug was something I did for a Christmas stall. The wallpaper was for a competition. I am always busy on something and have sketchbooks full of ideas. I never have time to do all of them!

Where and when will we see more Anna Chilton work? 
I am working towards my final show at the moment, which involves some wall hangings. I’m hoping to bring a modern twist to this rather old-fashioned product. I’m still developing the pieces but you can expect plenty of illustrative work and a lot of narrative. This will be at London College of Communications in Elephant and Castle, London, on 19 June.

I am also hoping to show at this years’ New Designers at London’s Business design Centre on 25-28 June, so look out for the London Collage of Communications stand.

Then I’ll be living between London and the south of France where I have some cheap studio space lined up to give me the space I need to try and get some products out into the world.

Annachilton.tumblr.com

Introducing... The Common Room

When former performance artist, Kate Hawkins, retired from her chosen medium, she followed a new vision: to make good, contemporary art accessible to "the many, rather than the few". 

Her solution? To commission working artists to design conceptual wallpapers, and sell them in her new shop, The Common Room. I think the brand new company's first designs are very exciting. What do you reckon?

'282 Ways of Making a Salad', above, by Fine Art/Philosophy graduate James Ferris, takes its title from a 1950s book of celebrity salad recipes (it exists, I checked on Amazon).

Wallpaper has generally been thought of as background rather than foreground," Kate and co explain. "but our wallpapers are designed to challenge and excite. Just like every great artwork."

The concept not a million miles away from Fenton Art and Design, who I wrote about last year – ethos-wise, at least, as both business models are focused on supporting either emerging or established artistic talent.

'Back to Front', above, by Goshka Macuga, is based on a scan of the threads from the back of one of the large scale tapestries she makes; "the hidden workings, the threads and knots" showing "how an artwork is all tied together".

The papers are for sale at £85 per roll, with samples at £1.50 each. See other artists' designs including Kate's own at Commonroom.co

Post by Kate

Object of the day: Sanderson 'Manila'

It's holiday time of year for the organised among us. 

If that's not you (it's not me), or if your holiday is about open fires and British countryside, you could always bring the heat home instead. And these two prints, in Sanderson's new Manila range, would do it for me.

A good tip if you don't want to commit to wallpapering properly, or can only stretch to one roll of the stuff, is to paper a board instead – as above. Use MDF if your panel won't be as big as this one (the stuff weighs a tonne) or even plywood if sturdy isn't a requirement, and you fancy making it portable.

You could also buy a roll with a buddy and split it to make a bed headboard or fill picture frames, top an old table (smother it with PVA glue or non-yellowing varnish), renew a paper drum lampshade (get a hot glue gun – amazing things), spruce your stair risers (wallpaper paste and matt varnish)... Any other ideas?

The fabric could be fashioned in a similar way but using an artist's canvas stretcher.

The Manila wallpaper is £52 RRP per roll and the fabric is £49 per metre. Find it at Sanderson-uk.com

Object of the day: CUSTHOM's latest embroidered fabric

I've written about Custhom before: the young design company's particular speciality is their unusual and striking digital embroidery technique, which gives their textiles a tactile, 3-D quality.

Now they've just launched a new range of cotton wallpaper and fabric using the same methods.

The south London-based pair behind Custhom Nathan Philpott and Jemma Ooi only met – at the Royal College of Art – in 2009 but have already created designs for Anthropologie, Liberty and John Lewis among others.

This latest collection from them has been inspired by ancient Mexican Otomi embroidery: graphic and organic shapes combined to depict man living in harmony with the natural environment. The style is said to date back to prehistoric cave paintings in Tenango.

But Custhom have given it a contemporary twist, not least with their innovative use of digital embroidery which gives the patterns a sharp precision. Each piece design has been created with skilled British craftsmen who embroider onto non-woven paper or cotton fabric.

The textiles come in navy on an off-white background, or in off-black. The fabric is £126 a metre and the wallpaper comes in 55cm wide rolls and costs £84 per metre. Not cheap, but the work involved makes these pieces works of art. And a little, I think, could go a long way with a bit of creative use.

Do check out some of the other striking designs from Custhom: I would particularly recommend their distinctive Offset cushions, and the elegant Palladian collection, which features ceramics and textiles. I have particularly fallen for the Palladian Loop wallpaper. For a budget buy, they also sell some of the designs in tea-towel form, for £12.

Check it all out at Custhom.co.uk

Post by Kate. Images from Custhom

Freestyle Wednesday: mix colours like a pro

When I visited Home 2014 a couple of weeks ago, I finally met Tania James, one half of colourful design duo, Quirk and Rescue. 

It reminded me that I've long meant to post a photo of Q&R's rather amazing geometric Wundt wallpaper.

For starters, I like the paper itself (more details of which below). But also, I love how their photograph of it in situ is styled. It throws out all preconceptions about how to use colour. What do you think?

There are so many colours going on, and some are lone sharks – basking in their brightness, not a thought of finding a partner: the pink, the green, the yellow and the grey... Why does it work? I'd sometimes like to be bolder with my colour choices, so I thought I'd break it down to see what I could learn.

For starters, if you've met Tania, or at least seen her spectacular hair, you'll know she's not a woman scared by colour. So confidence is a start. But besides that, I think its secret is partly that it is clean. It is not only well-ordered and neatly arranged so as to avoid a clutter of objects to jar with the collection of colours, but also the arrangement of the colours themselves is clean. Orange and blue, of course, dominate – and in a large scale pattern, too, which means it doesn't look bitty and messy. These colours are also echoed tidily in the filing cabinet labels and electric cable; all this combined makes them your solid anchor. Red pops up in three places, in the lamp, dish and a book: a trio is always a tidy design trick. The white of the floor is picked up in a book and the lightbulb: ditto. This solid base allows for a couple of wild cards, even clashes – in the books, the pink ampersand, the grey cabinet and the wooden table. Very clever.

If you like the wallpaper, it costs £90 a roll and comes in some other lovely colour combinations (the grey/green is my favourite). Find it and other good stuff – including the excellent, new font tea-towels – at Quirkandrescue.com

And here are some older posts about colour.

Post by Kate, image Quirk & Rescue

Piet Hein Eek: new wood wallpaper range – over it already?

Piet Hein Eek's Scrapwood wallpaper, which we first covered here in 2011, has now appeared in so many photoshoots and shopping pages that it's almost jumped the shark. Or has it? 

Perhaps that's just what people, like me, who spend every day poring over such photoshoots think. Either way. I still love it: I've long hankered after wood panelled walls – this midcentury kitchen still makes me sigh – and wallpaper is an interesting way to get the look, especially with the sorts of woods that would be a nightmare to install in real life (unless you're hiring Retrouvius to do up your house, perhaps).

Anyway, so yesterday, it was revealed that the Dutch design company has released a new range of designs, along the same theme. So, are we still into wallpaper that looks like wood...

...or do you prefer the real thing?

This reminds me of the beautiful bar built from colourful strips of wood that I saw in a cafe in Brooklyn earlier this year.

This design also comes in a beautiful, soft chalky green too. And how good does that orange look against the grey?

This design is definitely made feasible by being wallpaper rather than real ends of assorted wood.

Pale and interesting?

See the full range exclusively at Rockett St George. It is launched next week, on 2 November, but available to pre-order.

And for a few more ideas on getting some outdoors into your indoors, you might find inspiration in this previous post.

Post by Kate

Emma Boomkamp's wallpaper with history

What do you make of this? It's a bit full-on, but I kind of like it – but then I find anonymous old portraits are endlessly absorbing. However, I'm almost more interested in the story behind the wallpaper.

It's almost the perfect design for a downstairs loo or the loos at a restaurant, don't you think? A bit too much to have in your face in the distance, perhaps, but brilliant close-up with your full attention. And here's a close-up of the design, above, Femmes Fatales.

Staring at all those different characters really fires the imagination. Who were they? Were they happy? Heroic? Notorious? What daily worries troubled them? And as for those spectacular outfits...

The paper, which comes in three themes – broadly: men, women and children – comes from Dutch/Mexican designer Emma Boomkamp, (very) full name Emma Gavaldon van Leeuwen Boomkamp, and the back-story is lovely. The range, called Vanitas, is made up with photos from the archives of Atelier Jakob Merkelbach, a renowned Amsterdam photography studio that opened in 1913.

Here are the two other designs, Mauvais Garçon and Enfant Terrible, in close-up form.

What chaps! (What props!)

Recently, this extensive photographic collection was digitised – no mean feat since the images were on glass plates, many coloured by hand on both sides of the glass. There were also 40,000 of them.

Part of the purpose of this painstaking task, commissioned by Amsterdam City Archives, was to showcase the images in order to find out who the people in the photographs were. It was also to preserve them, since in the 1970s thousands of the pictures were destroyed by a flood – they didn't want to lose any more. You can read more about the project over at the website of the devoted digitisers, Picturae.

And in the designer's own words: "Vanitas presents an enchanting look into the past and reminds us of the transience of life."

For the next three days, you can buy Emma Boomkamp's wallpaper at Triitme.com, a short-sale site specialising in European design. It costs around £169 for nine metres – making a tiny space like a loo more appealing still. You can also check it out at Emmaboomkamp.com

Post by Kate

Introducing... textile designer Anna Wooster

As London Design Festival draws closer – the city-wide event here that (among other things) shows off heaps of new creative talent – I'm plundering last year's finds...

...all those flyers and cards and notes I scribbled when I saw something I liked. Here's one: Anna Wooster, an interesting, not-long-graduated textile designer with a suitably urban edge to her work.

From Brighton to LDN

Since gaining her first class honours just last year, she's had her patterns on sale at the Natural Curtain Company and through online shop, Perry Nelvill, which focuses on hunting out new textiles and fashion graduates to watch.

Bristol Block

LDN High

Manc Damask

"My designs are heavily influenced by my love for ‘traditional’ textile design styles such as Toiles de Jouy, willow patterns and chintz," Anna says. "I have a passion for pictorial designs and visual delicates but I am also greatly inspired by the concept of something beautiful having another meaning, narrative or message."

The toile-with-a-twist idea has been done before – notably by Timorous Beasties (whose gritty tableaux may well win the prize for most ubiquitous gastro pub loo wallpaper ever) but city landscapes have so much beauty and design potential – I just don't think they can be plundered too much. Besides, could there be a better name for a fabric than Manc Damask?

Bristol Stripe

See more of Anna's work at her website.

Eve Spencer's provocative wallpaper

Well... not only provocative wallpaper. The stuff you'll see below – all created by wallpapers and fabric company, Eve Spencer – that falls under that category is also most beautiful. Though the hawk killing a cat, daddy long legs and "Oil Bird" designs may not be everyone's fancy.

Among some of the other prints, there is just the beautiful – but with a non frilly, girlie angle (so much wallpaper can be so painfully lady-like and proper, don't you think? I'm much more for a bit of gritty Timorous Beasties).

So as not to startle too swiftly, here's my favourite of the not-so-startling Eve Spencer designs: "Tropic"; jungly greens in repetition. Simple. I am fairly certain this is the wallpaper I have long coveted on the back wall at a local cafe (at southeast London's Brockwell Lido, in case you have been). Leafy textiles are one of my favourite ways for getting some outdoors inside.

Here are some of the company's other wallpapers, including the afore-mentioned cat/hawk and daddy long legs designs. All are available as fabrics, too (but prices vary as these can be made to order in different sizes). You can buy them at Evespencer.com

"Sync Swim"

"Maple" (comes in two colourways)

"Kingfish" (comes with two different background colours)

"Kaleido" (also comes in a more muted colour combination)

"Jasper" (this carroty design comes in three subtly different colour options)

"Grass Hop" (this also comes with a lovely, mad flash of acid yellow)

"Bluster"

"Bat Wing" (choose from a lovely petrol blue or pale grey as alternative backgrounds)

"Stork" (white or yellow backgrounds also available)

"Ski"

"Geo DDL" (daddy long legs, if you look closely; this is also available in muted, mid-century yellow or grey)

"Cat Hawk": could you live with this in your house?

The creative force behind the unusual and often bold – or plain shocking – Eve Spencer designs is Helen Spencer, and the British-manufactured finished products are not cheap. For the papers, you're looking at around £260 per roll.

But I always think splashing out in moderation, for one-off things that result in a stand-out corner or just make you really, really happy when you look at them, can be justifiable (and small expensive touches make your cheap, high-street stuff look more exclusive). So if you could only afford one roll of luxury wallpaper like this, here are some things you could do with it – so no excuse for a feature wall! (Am I alone in hating the things?)

Paper a nook. Did you see contributing editor Abi's slightly ridiculous but brilliant golden nook? The nooks on the left are papered in Eve Spencer designs.

Use it to back decorative shelves or the insides of glass-fronted cupboards

Make a bed headboard. Cover a cut-to-size piece of MDF in the paper by pasting it on, and wrapping it around the edges and corners – you'll need some well thought-out corner slits at the back to avoid wrinkles. Personally I'd then varnish it with a matt finish to protect it and make it wipe-clean-able.

Make it into stand-alone art. Paste it onto a large board made of something like MDF and hang onto a wall as artwork. I have done something similar in my front room with fabric (which also comes as a wallpaper). That's in the right – slightly mad cushion overkill going on now I revist that day. I'll blame the dog, it's usually his fault. Anyway, here the fabric is stretched on a canvas stretcher, which makes it really light-weight and easy to hang. The fabric was a gift from my brother and sister-in-law who live in Australia. The designer of this rather startlingly bold print is Florence Broadhurst, a 1950s Antipodean textiles designer whose archive has been revived in recent years.

Do the smallest room in it. Like a downstairs/separate loo.

Decorate your stair risers. And I'd get the pieces guillotined by an art shop or anyone you know who does the sort of job where they'll have such a machine – cutting them by hand will require very steady fingers.

Top a table with paper you love, and cover in cut-to-size glass.

Decoupage something. Cut paper into pieces and decoupage, say, a knackered wooden chair with it. A good use of sample sizes too. I also loved this idea, left, from a stylish French shop.

Make a backsplash. Again, protected with glass. This is trickier; it will need to be sealed to stay dry. A kitchen/bathroom shop is a good place to get advice so as to avoid blobs of sealant being visible under the glass.