The university stripe is a narrow, evenly spaced band of the kind that appears on boating blazers, scarves and ribbon, a stripe defined by regularity rather than by width, and one of the very few patterns that has never gone out of use in an English interior. Cambridge Stripe is that stripe, drawn cleanly and then left alone.
Its value in a room is architectural. A vertical of this rhythm raises a ceiling and squares up a wall that is out of true, and because there is no motif to accommodate it will run behind furniture, pictures and joinery without anything having to be arranged around it. It reads as a background in the way that only a stripe and a plain can.
It hangs on a random match, the practical advantage of a design with no horizontal element: drops need no aligning, the paper is forgiving on irregular walls, and offcuts can be used in reveals and above doors rather than wasted. On a 0.53 m roll it suits any room. Use it in a hall, a bedroom, a bathroom or a nursery, or below a dado with plain paint above. It is the paper to reach for when a room needs order rather than incident.
