Cole & Son | Alcazar Gardens

The Real Alcazar in Seville is a building of layers, Mudejar carving over earlier foundations with Renaissance additions on top, and its gardens carry the same accumulation. The design studio did not attempt a topographical record of it. Alcazar Gardens is an invention built from the place: arcades, water, clipped hedges, palms and tilework, arranged as a pictorial scene rather than as a repeating motif.

The drawing is illustrative, closer to a watercolour than to a wallpaper, and the composition is deep, with foreground planting, a middle distance of arches and sky beyond. That depth is unusual in a printed paper and it changes what the wall does. Rather than putting pattern on a surface, it opens the surface, which in a small or dark room can be worth more than any amount of decoration.

An 83.8 cm straight repeat and a wide 0.69 m roll let the scene run across a wall without the joins becoming legible. It asks for a room it can fill, a dining room, a hall, a garden room, and for plain everything else. Set against painted plaster and unpolished stone it reads as a picture rather than as a paper. It is offered in a single arrangement, which is right for a design conceived as one image.