Cole & Son | Absence of Roses Moire

Two things are layered here, and both are archival. The rose belongs to Vivienne Westwood, first drawn for the Gold Label Cafe Society collection of spring-summer 1994 and taken originally from Redoute, the botanist who worked for Marie Antoinette; in this later Absence of Roses version the flower is reduced to silhouette. The ground beneath it is Cole & Son's own Moire, developed by the company's founder to give paper the watered look of silk, using crushed pearl pigment to catch light the way a woven cloth does.

Put together they behave like fabric rather than print. The moire runs in soft bands across the wall and shifts as you move past it, and the roses sit on that movement as a jacquard motif would sit in a weave. Close up the silhouette is graphic and quite severe; from the middle of a room the whole surface reads as figured silk, which is a rarer effect in wallpaper than it sounds.

The half-drop repeat staggers the roses so no vertical line forms down the wall, and at 76 cm it is a generous repeat, worth allowing for when ordering. On a 0.69 m roll it covers ground quickly. Best in rooms where a certain theatricality is wanted and can be answered: a drawing room, a dining room, a bedroom with good curtains and low light.