Cocktails comes from an ice bucket. Piero Fornasetti designed one in the nineteen-fifties called Oggetti Cocktail, covered in drawings of bottles and glassware, and the wallpaper takes that decoration and spreads it across a wall. The habit behind it is the one that defines his whole output: choose a single subject, draw every version of it you can think of, and repeat the results until the ordinary becomes strange.
The drawing is mid-century and unmistakably so, with stylised bottle silhouettes, glasses reduced to their outlines, and everything described by line with no modelling at all. Because each object is different, the repeat is slow to reveal itself; the eye reads a collection rather than a pattern, and keeps finding shapes it had not noticed on the previous pass.
The full-colour arrangement follows Fornasetti's original sketches, with quieter alternatives available where a lighter touch is wanted. It belongs exactly where you would expect and is none the worse for it: a bar, a cloakroom, a dining room, the inside of a drinks cupboard. Against dark paint, old timber and glass it reads as a collector's wall rather than as a joke. It has the wit of the Fornasetti archive without any of the strain.
