Marly was the small house Louis XIV built to escape Versailles: the same taste on a private scale, where the formality was maintained but the audience was very much smaller. It is the right reference for this stripe, which is grand in proportion and restrained in everything else.
The stripe is wide and painterly, laid in chalky matte colour with the brush left visible in it, so the bands have body and slight variation rather than a printed flatness. Between them runs a thin ribbon of metallic, gold or gilver or bronze according to the colourway, and the disproportion is the whole point: a broad, soft, powdery band set against a fine, precise, reflective line. Each makes the other look like what it is.
A wide stripe is an architectural instrument. It gives a room vertical emphasis, corrects a low ceiling, and provides an underlying order that furniture and pictures can be arranged against. It works in a hall, a dining room, a bedroom with good height, and it is at its best where the joinery is painted plainly and the fabrics are simple, so that the metallic line remains the only glint in the room. It also takes well to being used only above a dado, where the stripe can run to the cornice uninterrupted.
