Fonteyn is named for Margot Fonteyn, and the name is doing more than commemorating. The design is drawn as movement: trails of honeysuckle and milk thistle turn around one another in a continuous line up the drop, each sprig pivoting off the last, so the eye is carried rather than stopped.
It is a two-tone design, which is unusual for a damask and is the reason it stays so quiet. There is no third colour to create contrast and no metallic to catch the light. Instead the pattern is held in a close tonal relationship with its ground, and the screen printing gives it a soft matte surface with no sheen at all. Read from across a room it is very nearly a texture. The wide 0.69 m roll and the 64 cm straight repeat mean fewer seams and a full motif to each drop.
This is the kind of paper that will still look right in fifteen years. It belongs in drawing rooms, principal bedrooms and dining rooms, in rooms where the architecture is decent and the scheme is built from fabric and furniture rather than from wall pattern. It also takes hung pictures unusually well, which is not true of most damasks.
