The Moroccan lantern is one of Martyn Lawrence Bullard's recurring motifs, and in Fez Border it is used at architectural scale: a run of hanging lanterns drawn in sequence along a horizontal band, made to be hung as a border rather than as a field.
Each lantern was hand-painted, and deliberately not tidied. The metalwork is drawn with a slightly worn line, the facets are uneven, and the whole thing carries the softness of an object that has been in use for a long time. Metallic printing does the rest, catching where the lantern's glass would catch and giving the band a low glow under lamplight rather than a flat shine. Because each lantern is drawn slightly differently, the run never falls into an obvious repeat along a long wall.
Borders have quietly returned, and this is a good argument for them. Run it at picture-rail height in a hall, above a dado in a dining room, or around the head of a papered bedroom to close the scheme. Used with a plain ground it gives a room a horizontal line where the architecture has failed to provide one, which is a small quantity of paper doing a disproportionate amount of work.
