Cole & Son | Tijou Gate

Jean Tijou was the French master smith William III commissioned to make a dozen iron screens for the gardens at Hampton Court Palace, and those screens still stand in the Privy Garden where they were installed, scrolling acanthus and all. Tijou Gate takes that ironwork as its subject and draws it as a wallpaper panel, hand-drawn and hand-painted rather than photographed or traced.

What survives the translation is the logic of the metal. The scrollwork carries the composition, and the flowers are set into it the way real climbing plants find their way through a screen, so the pattern has both a structure and something growing over it. Drawn by hand, the curves are a fraction irregular, which keeps the design from the flatness that a mechanical rendering of ironwork would produce.

It is a straight match, and as a panel design it wants a wall with proportions worth respecting: a hall, a dining room, a landing, the end wall of a garden room. Cole & Son made it with Historic Royal Palaces, and the association is worth knowing when the paper goes up. This is a specific object in a specific garden rather than a generic ironwork motif, and rooms tend to reward being furnished as though that were understood.