Parterre Border is the trellis of the Parterre paper turned inside out. The colouring is reversed, so what is ground in the paper becomes line in the border and the other way about, and the two can therefore be used together without the join reading as more of the same. It is a device from the days when papers were sold as schemes rather than as single patterns.
At 40 cm high this is a substantial band rather than a trim, deep enough to carry the garden geometry legibly and to alter the proportion of a wall. Run at the top of a room it lowers a high ceiling and gives the eye somewhere to stop; run above a dado it does the opposite, establishing a horizontal that makes a tall room feel considered rather than merely tall.
The repeat is 64 cm on a straight match, and the roll gives 10.05 m of length, generally enough for the perimeter of a good-sized room. It works above panelling, around a bathroom, in a hall where a full paper would be too much. Set against a plain painted wall rather than its own paper, it becomes something closer to an applied moulding.
