Zulu Border comes from an unlikely source: the pedestal base of a ceramic vase, where a band of leopard spot sits beneath a moulded edge. Taken off the pot and drawn out flat, it becomes a border with an ornamental moulded lip above a field of spots that graduates softly from dense to sparse across its width.
That graduation is what makes it versatile. Run horizontally around the base of a wall it behaves as a skirting or a dado, the moulded edge reading as the top rail and the spots fading downward towards the floor. Turned on its side and hung vertically as a reverse, the same graduation becomes a wide ombre stripe, and the design stops being a border at all. Very few trims will do two entirely different jobs.
It comes on a 0.69 m roll, 10.05 m long, with a 76.2 cm repeat and a random match, so nothing needs aligning and it can be cut, butted and stopped wherever the room requires without waste. Used with the wider Ardmore designs it closes them off properly; used alone against a plain painted wall it does the work of a piece of joinery. It suits a dining room, a stair, a cloakroom or a dressing room, and it takes very well to strong colour on the woodwork.
