Giselle is two designs at once. The upper layer is a fine trailing damask, drawn light and open, more a wandering line than a formal motif. Beneath it runs Jaspe, one of the oldest patterns in the Cole & Son archive, the vertical striation originally produced at the North London factory by pulling a brush through wet colour to imitate the irregularity of silk.
That combination is what gives the paper its depth. The damask reads as pattern, the strie behind it reads as cloth, and the eye keeps resolving one against the other. The mother-of-pearl colourings sit on a mica ground, so the surface shifts as light crosses it and the striation appears to move. At 64 cm on a 0.52 m roll with a straight match, the damask trail lines up level across the drops and the vertical striation runs unbroken from ceiling to skirting.
It is a paper for rooms where the light changes through the day: a drawing room with more than one aspect, a principal bedroom, a dining room lit by candles in the evening. It flatters plaster and gilding, takes mirrors well, and does not compete with good curtains, which is the most that can be asked of a damask.
