Albery began in the Cole & Son archive, where ornamental fragments were reassembled into the shape of a bevelled mirror panel. The result reads as a wall of antique glass laid out in a regular tile, each panel edged as a mirror is edged, with the shallow chamfer that catches light differently from the flat centre. It is decorative in the eighteenth-century manner without any of the weight that usually comes with it.
The design is printed on a foil backing, and this is what makes it. The metallic ground sits behind the drawing and returns light back through it, so the panels appear to have depth and a faint silvering, in the way old mirror does when the backing has begun to go. The effect changes across the day and changes again under lamplight; it is never quite the same surface twice.
At a 53 cm straight repeat on a 0.53 m roll the tile squares up neatly, one panel per width, which makes it well behaved around doors and chimney breasts. It belongs in rooms that want reflection rather than pattern: a dining room, a small bar, a cloakroom, a windowless dressing room where a reflective wall does the work a window cannot.
