Woolverston is taken from an eighteenth-century silk design, and it carries the evidence of that origin in its scale. Woven silk damasks of the period were limited by the loom, and the small, tightly repeated motif that resulted is quite different in character from the large printed damasks that came later, closer to a textile grain than to an architectural ornament.
Reproduced on paper, that quality survives. The motif is small and the repeat is short, so at any distance beyond a few feet the wall reads as a lustrous, evenly figured surface rather than as a pattern of discrete units. Several colourways set a metallic against a matte ground, which is exactly how a silk damask behaves: the design appears and disappears depending on the angle of the light, since in the original it was made by the direction of the thread rather than by colour at all.
It hangs as a straight match on a 0.53 m roll with a 64 cm repeat. Small damasks of this kind are the traditional answer for a room that needs to be dressed without being decorated, such as a dining room, a drawing room, a principal bedroom or a stair hall hung with pictures. It takes frames and mirrors particularly well, because the repeat is fine enough that cutting through it is never noticeable.
