Cole & Son | Letaba March

A group of elephants is a memory, which is the sort of collective noun that sounds invented until you find it in use, and Letaba March is built around one. The animals move together towards water, and the design gives them the character of a procession rather than a herd: a bush theatre, staged and populated, with monkeys in the branches and big cats and giraffes between.

The elephants carry the design's most deliberate invention. Their ears, tusks and hides are covered in applied ornament in the manner of Zulu beadwork, so each animal becomes a decorated object as well as a creature, and there is a second, smaller artwork inside the first. Above them the fronds of the Lala palm close over the whole scene, and that canopy is what holds the composition together; without it the parade would simply run off the top of the wall.

Every part of the surface is worked, which is the Ardmore habit and the source of the richness here. It needs a wall long enough for the march to make sense, a dining room, a broad landing, a garden room, and it is best given plain floors and unpatterned upholstery to work against.