Woodstock comes out of the swinging sixties and makes no attempt to be subtle about it: bold swirls and waves running across the wall in a continuous liquid rhythm, the drawing of a period that had discovered the poster and the light show at roughly the same moment. Designs like this were meant to be looked at rather than lived quietly alongside.
Its interest now is in how well it has aged. The pattern is built from a single repeating wave form, which gives it a discipline most psychedelia lacks, and the intervals are even enough that a whole wall of it reads as an ordered surface rather than as chaos. Several colourways use a metallic or a foil, which turns the swirls into a moving field of light and takes the design closer to an op-art surface than to a printed paper.
It suits rooms that can take a decision: a bar, a cloakroom, a dressing room, a small dining room, the back wall of a study. The scale is large, so a confined space is more successful than a big one, where the movement can become restless. With chrome, glass, dark lacquer and a strong floor it reads as period-conscious rather than nostalgic, which is the difference between using a sixties design well and dressing a room as a set.
