Zoe & Drew: Print and Pattern in the Home

Back in the Ninties the Changing Room team would bounce onto our television screens offering advice for using colour in our homes. Often the designers would create vibrant, if not sometimes questionable, interiors in other peoples homes, inspiring the viewers to recreate the look themselves. Over the past few years the trend has changed again as we now reguarly use print and pattern to decorate our homes.

Image courtesy of Amy Butler Design

Just as the Changing Room team showed us how to create new designs on a budget, using pattern and print in our homes is no longer for those with big budgets due to the increase in textile designers producing ranges that are accessible to smaller budgets. Amy Butler has designed several fabric collections which work equally well as cushions or bags and some of her designs are even printed on home decor weight fabric so can be used for making curtains. In the past few months Amy Butler has collaborated with UK based wallpaper company Graham and Brown to produce an ecologically responsible range of wallpaper that has been printed here in the UK. All the designs are printed on responsibly sourced FSC base using water base inks. In this new collection there are six colourways, Moss, Midnight, Sunset, Ocean, Field and Stone. Within each colourway there are six designs,that all co-ordinate within their colourway, hence 36 fantastic new wallpaper designs. This range is perfect if you are a novice interior designer or wary of using pattern on your walls, as you can be reassured that the prints will work together or on their own.

Trevelyan from Designers Guild

However we are not all confident in mixing print and pattern in our homes. Putting together a room is a bit like creating a patchwork quilt, carefully choosing colours, patterns and prints that compliment each other. Perhaps you would like a big, bold print for wallpaper, then it would be wiser to choose smaller patterns for soft furnishings or you may prefer to pick the main colours in the wallpaper and use different textures in these colours for your soft furnishings, maybe having monotone velvet curtains and silk cushion covers.

Far Far Away from Harlequin

Often fabric collections are designed to be co-ordinated offering you bold prints and stripes or smaller patterns. Harlequin and Designers Guild offer gorgeous collections for nearly every room in your home, producing wallpaper and textiles for soft furnishings that beautifully compliment each other and provide you with the simpler task of creating a fabulous room. The Far Far Away collection from Harlequin would be perfect for a childs bedroom or playroom, with it’s bold hot air balloon and double decker bus design which co-ordinates perfectly with ginghams and stripes in matching colours. The Juniper collection from Harlequin would be better suited to a living room or bedroom, with cerise being an opulent key colour that seems to bring together the fabric and wallpaper within this collection. Whereas their Amelie collection is a fresher colour palette and the simplicity of the stripes against the floral print may seem an easier choice for those of us that shy away from using statement patterns in our homes.