‘I grew up in drenched rooms,’ says Lulu Lytle, founder and creative director of Soane Britain. ‘My childhood bedroom was wrapped in floral wallpaper with matching curtains, as were my sisters’ rooms and even my parents’.’ For Lulu, the idea of papering every surface – walls, ceiling, the lot – never felt like a radical gesture. It was simply what rooms looked like.
That ease with total commitment is perhaps the whole point. Wallpaper drenching, the practice of covering walls and ceiling in the same paper, often extending to curtains and upholstery in a matching fabric, is, on paper, a lot. In practice, something very interesting tends to happen.
The first room in which Lulu fully committed to wallpaper drenching was in her West London home, a fourth-floor flat in a grand 1860s stucco house, originally maids’ quarters. It had low ceilings and little architectural ornament. Rather than fighting that plainness, she leant into it – the lack of detail, she says, ‘actually felt like a prompt.’ She papered both walls and ceiling in ‘Lotus Palmette’, one of Soane’s earliest designs, and made curtains from the matching fabric. ‘The deep red colour became a wonderful backdrop for our collection of Islamic pictures, textiles, metalwork and ceramics.’
For Max Rollitt, the appeal is something close to primal. ‘There’s something almost tent-like about it,’ he says. ‘The room becomes enclosed, or wrapped, like a present. It creates a sense of being cocooned or swaddled, and that feeling of enclosure brings an immediate sense of comfort.’ He finds the effect works particularly well in rooms with pitched ceilings, where papering the sloping sections – the skillings – really enhances that quality. ‘It does, however, require some real mastery from the wallpaper hanger, where peculiarities of the pattern collide on joints.’
The question of where to stop is one that Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay thinks about in practical as much as aesthetic terms. ‘The maximalist nature of drenching means that most of the room should be given over to the pattern,’ she says, stopping at the natural breaks – skirting boards, architraves, doors – ‘otherwise the room becomes a little impractical.’ There is a logic to it beyond the visual, too: ‘patterns help hide funny, awkward angles rather than highlight them,’ she says – something plain walls would never do.
The worry most people bring to a drenched room is that it will be too much to live with. But Lulu’s experience is almost the opposite. ‘A room that commits fully to one idea can be surprisingly calming, because your eye isn’t constantly negotiating contrast. There’s a particular kind of peace that comes from immersion. When the walls, ceiling and upholstery are all saying the same thing, the room feels resolved – and that sense of resolution is deeply comfortable.’ Max takes a similarly relaxed view on busyness. ‘I don't really see it as a problem.’ If you do want to soften it, he suggests keeping other bold design choices to a minimum, ‘so there aren’t too many different visual messages for the eye to absorb.’ Henri’s solution is layering: ‘curtains that contrast, rugs, and solid blocks of colour in the woodwork can let the pattern breathe.’
Which leaves the question of pattern. Big or small? Graphic or organic? ‘Unhelpfully,’ says Lulu, ‘I don't think there's a definitive answer.’ She has seen drenched rooms work brilliantly with very small patterns and with large, confident ones; with restrained monochromes and with richly layered colour. What matters far more than the pattern itself, she says, is the commitment. ‘When you stop hedging your bets, the pattern stops feeling decorative and starts to feel integral to the architecture of the room.’ The approach, she adds, works best when you go all in, without hesitation – which, when you think about it, is also the only way to find out whether you love it.
