Seasonal Woods keeps the authority of Woods, the most recognised design in the house, and softens its hand. Silver birches stand through a woodland where the whole year is present at once: ivy and holly, brambles and apples, woodpeckers and robins in the branches, butterflies between them. Six drops complete the scene, 3.12 metres wide by 4 metres high.
It is a panorama rather than a repeating paper, so the composition is fixed and the balance deliberate, with trunks providing vertical rhythm, foliage massing at mid-height and open ground above and below. The palettes vary widely in character. Some are chalk-matte and quiet; others carry a soft pearlescence that lifts the birches as light moves across the wall. Where a repeating paper asks to be looked past, a panorama asks to be looked at, and the room should be arranged accordingly.
Hung as a single tableau it becomes a feature wall in the proper sense; repeated, it lines a room and dissolves its corners. Either way it needs measuring and setting out before ordering, with allowance for how skirtings, cornices and openings will crop the scene. Dining rooms and bedrooms suit it best, being rooms looked at from a fixed position where the composition can be read whole. It is also the more forgiving of the two on a wall with an off-centre chimney breast.
