Mulberry Home | Country Plaid

Country Plaid is a proper wool tartan, woven rather than printed, so the crossed check sits right through the cloth and looks the same worn or fresh. It has the dry, slightly nubbly hand you want from a wool this weight, and a scale that reads clearly from across a room without turning into a costume-drama cliché. It comes from Mulberry's Wools book, a small family of checks and plaids the house does with real conviction.

It is a 100 per cent wool cloth, 120 centimetres wide, with a 31 centimetre vertical repeat and a 27 centimetre horizontal one, so the check sits at a genuinely domestic scale rather than a formal tartan's. It is recommended for curtains and upholstery, and will do a fair job of a bedspread too, though we tend to keep something this warm off large flat expanses of bed linen. There is one colourway, Red/Lovat/Heather, a soft red and mossy green crossed over a dusty heather ground, warm without tipping into anything hunting-lodge.

We reach for a wool plaid like this on the pieces that want a bit of weight: a wing chair, a pair of curtains in a study or a hall, a window seat cushion that gets sat on all winter. It also makes a good bench cushion or stair-runner border, where the check gives a plain stone floor something to answer to. Keep the rest of the room to a plain wool or a narrow stripe. Sold by the half metre; order a sample to see it in your own light.

A wool this weight needs proper handling: allow a full repeat per drop so the crossed check lines up at the seams, and ask your maker to centre the pattern on any cushion or seat front rather than let it fall where it lands. It does not like damp, so keep it out of bathrooms and hard-used boot rooms, and have it dry cleaned professionally rather than washed.

• Composition: 100% wool
• Width: 120 cm (47 in)
• Pattern repeat: 31 cm vertical, 27 cm horizontal
• Suitable for: Curtains, loose upholstery, fixed upholstery, bedspreads
• Care: Dry clean only; do not wash, bleach or iron
• Collection: Bohemian Romance, Mulberry Home
• Colourways: 1 (Red/Lovat/Heather)