Flock is one of the oldest ways of decorating a wall: powdered wool laid onto a printed adhesive so the pattern stands slightly proud and takes light like velvet. Cole & Son's founder, John Perry, brought the technique back into commercial production in the late nineteenth century, and Fanfare Flock uses it on a design taken from the same period of the archive.
The pattern is a botanical fanfare, long feathered leaves that spray upward and outward from a central stem, drawn with enough space between them that each one stays legible. The flock is laid over the print in the same figure, so the leaves have a raised, matte nap against the flatter ground and the pattern changes as you move past it, deep from one side and almost disappearing from the other. The repeat is 52 cm with a straight match on a 0.52 m roll, which sets one full motif to each width.
Texture of this kind belongs in rooms used after dark. A dining room, a snug, a panelled bedroom, anywhere candlelight or lamplight can rake across it. It is a paper to be touched as well as looked at, and it rewards being hung on a wall people pass close to.
