The Chateau de Bagatelle was built in sixty-four days on a wager, and its garden was laid out in the Anglo-Chinese manner that swept France in the seventeen-eighties, with winding paths, contrived ruins, and the light bamboo trelliswork the French called treillage. Bagatelle takes that trellis and prints it flat.
The drawing is deliberately delicate. Canes cross at regular intervals with their joints described, and the lattice is fine enough that a wall of it reads as an open structure rather than as a grid. Because the design is essentially linear, it changes the apparent depth of a room: the wall recedes slightly, as trelliswork does when it is applied to real masonry, which is precisely why eighteenth-century gardeners used it on courtyard walls.
It is a small, quiet pattern, and its usefulness is in the rooms that connect other rooms: a garden hall, a passage, a conservatory, a downstairs cloakroom, a bathroom. It also does well as the background to a room hung with pictures or lined with painted furniture. Rush matting, painted timber and simple linen are the obvious companions; anything heavy will overwhelm it. Used through a small room it makes the walls read as an open structure.
