Cole & Son | Bahia

Two buildings sit behind this design and they are further apart than they look. The Bahia Palace in Marrakesh supplies the Moroccan fretwork, the pierced jali screens that filter light and air without closing a room. The Durbar Room at Osborne House supplies the second reference: a Victorian interior on the Isle of Wight, plastered in Indian ornament for a queen who never went to India. Bahia is drawn from both, which makes it a design about the transmission of ornament as much as about ornament itself.

It is composed as a doorway panel. The fretwork is drawn and painted by hand, and the lacework of the masonry is dense enough that the panel reads as pierced stone rather than as pattern, the whole point of a jali being that you see through it. Detail is carried at a level that survives close inspection, which is the only way this kind of work convinces.

The panel can stand alone as a single event on a wall, or be run side by side to make a continuous arcade, and it was designed to sit with the Jali Trellis as its coordinate. The roll is 0.69 m wide and 10.2 m long with a straight match. Use it at the end of a hall, behind a bath, or as the back of an alcove.