St Petersburg Damask is taken from an early twentieth-century fabric, and the redrawing preserves what makes such damasks work: the figure is open rather than solid, so the pattern is described by its outline and by the ground showing through it. At this scale that openness is what keeps a formal design from becoming heavy.
Beneath the damask runs a jaspe stripe, the fine vertical striation from the oldest of the house textures, and it does a great deal. The stripe gives the ground a woven quality and a subtle vertical lift, so the paper reads as silk-backed rather than as a print on a flat field, and the damask appears to float slightly clear of it. Two archive devices are therefore working at once, a damask and a texture, and neither is asked to carry the wall alone.
Each palette works one colour over a ground, from soft tonal pairings to sharp contrasts and one with a metallic pass, and the weight of the design changes accordingly. Formal rooms take it as intended: a dining room, a drawing room, a stair hall. It hangs comfortably behind gilt frames and against painted panelling, doing the job a silk once did. In a room with tall ceilings it is worth hanging full height rather than breaking it at a picture rail.
