Lettere Persiane is a light, semi-sheer canvas weave in pure virgin wool, digitally printed with a design drawn from oriental carpets: a Persian garden with trees and the birds that guard it. Because the ground is open, light comes through the cloth and the print behaves less like a picture on a surface and more like a screen. Wool gives it a soft hand and an easy, weighty fall, so the garden distorts gently as the panel moves, which is the pleasure of it.
Printed in Italy on 100 per cent virgin wool and sold as a panel of 145 by 328 centimetres, so the whole composition arrives as one piece rather than as repeats cut from a roll. Five colourways: 001 Palissandro, 002 Indigo, 003 Multicolor, 021 Grey and 022 Red / Bordeaux. Multicolor is the fullest reading of the garden; Grey and Palissandro reduce it almost to a drawing; Indigo is the one for a dark, enclosed room.
We hang it as a single unlined curtain where a window wants softening rather than blocking, as a pair of panels either side of a set of doors, or hung flat from a pole as a wall piece. It belongs with plain plaster, oak, rush and quiet upholstery. Sold per panel; order a sample before committing.
Count panels rather than metres. The 328 centimetre length gives a finished drop of roughly three metres once a heading and a hem are taken, and each panel makes one curtain width, so a pair for a typical window takes two panels flat or four with a gathered heading. Leave it unlined so the light can work, and hang it a week before judging it: wool needs time to drop.
