Some designs become shorthand, and Flamingos is one of them. The composition is simple: birds standing at intervals among sparse background foliage, drawn in profile, each one slightly different in posture from the last. What makes it endure is the nonchalance. The flamingos are not performing, and the pattern is therefore never arch. Two of the birds face away from the viewer in every repeat, which is a small thing and the whole reason it works.
The foliage behind them is deliberately underdrawn, a few reeds and leaves in a lighter tone, so the birds have room and the wall does not become crowded. At 70 cm the repeat is large, and the half-drop match spreads the birds diagonally across the width rather than stacking them in files, which is what stops a large-scale animal print from resolving into stripes. On a 0.53 m roll it hangs conventionally and the drops stay manageable in a small room.
It has been hung in every kind of room, which is a fair test. It works in a cloakroom papered floor to ceiling, in a bathroom, in a bedroom and behind a bar. It works less well on a single feature wall, where the repeat becomes obvious. Give it plain paint, a decent mirror and no other pattern.
