Cole & Son | Hispalis

Hispalis was the Roman name for Seville, given in full as Colonia Iulia Romula Hispalis when Julius Caesar designated the city, and taken from an older Iberian word for the place. The design looks back to that layer: an archway seen through dense overgrowth, drawn as a tapestry rather than as a view, with the architecture half lost in the planting.

The handling is what makes it. There is no clean perspective and no framed picture. The foliage is worked evenly across the whole surface in a low, sun-bleached register, and the archway emerges from it gradually, the way a ruin emerges from a garden that has stopped being tended. The colouring is deliberately dusty, closer to old woven cloth than to print, which is why the design reads as an antique object rather than as a scene painted on a wall.

It is at its most convincing hung across a whole room, where the overgrowth closes around you and there is no edge to remind you it is paper. A dining room, a study, a hall, a shaded garden room. It goes with terracotta, unpolished stone, old timber and plain heavy linen, and it wants warm light rather than cool.