Mark Alexander | Tama Wallcovering

Tama belongs to the Grasscloth Prints collection, which is exactly what the name says: a pattern printed directly onto a hand-laid grasscloth ground. The fibre runs horizontally beneath the print, so the ink sits unevenly, heavier where a strand stands proud and lighter in the troughs, and the pattern picks up a broken, worked quality that a smooth paper simply cannot give you. It is the texture doing half the work and the print doing the other half.

Rolls are 91 centimetres wide and 7.32 metres long, with a 66 centimetre vertical repeat. Six colourways are offered: Powder, Parchment, Sepia, Pewter, Typhoon and Paprika, three warm and three cool, with Paprika the only strong colour among them. Panel-to-panel variation in the grasscloth ground is inherent to the material and will show through the print as well as around it. We tell clients to expect it, because on a printed grasscloth it is the thing most often mistaken for a fault.

We use Tama in dining rooms, studies and principal bedrooms, and on the walls of a stair where the pattern is seen at an angle. It wants plain everything else: linen curtains, a wool carpet, matt paint on the joinery. Paprika is the one we would reserve for a single wall or a small enclosed room rather than run throughout a floor. Order a sample to see it in your own light.

Hang paste-the-wall, butting the drops and never overlapping them, and be careful to keep paste off the face, because a printed grasscloth marks and cannot be sponged clean. Match the pattern at eye level before smoothing the drop, and reverse alternate drops only if the pattern allows it, which on a directional print it may not. Order every roll from a single batch, check the batch number on each label, and add a spare roll to the order, because a later batch will not match.

• Roll width: 91 cm
• Roll length: 7.32 m
• Pattern repeat: 66 cm vertical
• Application: Paste-the-wall
• Suitable for: Dining rooms, studies, bedrooms, staircases
• Care: Wipe gently with a soft, dry cloth
• Collection: Grasscloth Prints, Mark Alexander
• Colourways: 6 (Paprika, Typhoon, Pewter, Sepia, Parchment, Powder)