Our Dusk marbled wallpaper recently won us an award at the Brit List Awards 2025!
We thought this would be perfect timing to share with you the journey from marbling tray to wallpaper. Many hands and many wonderful people help to bring the wallpaper to life and each stage is crucial to creating a high quality product.
Every design begins in life in Jemma's marbling studio in Melksham. Sometimes after lots of research and meetings between Jemma and Angela a design is created to bring a vision to life, at other times its much more organic and a design is created happenstance, as was the case with our Juniper 'Blue Anise' which was the first pattern we put our House of Amitié stamp on.
We always have a pile of many we love and the hard part is whittling this down which requires us to be quite strict with ourselves which isn't our forte. The below 'pile' of hand marbled papers incorporates our Dusk, Aurora, Rosa and Dalloway. The others, whilst we loved them, were not destined to become wallpaper.
So much time, effort and money goes in to the stages that follow, so its crucial we choose a design/s that we feel can be seen in an interior and that holds a degree of versatility.
Our designs are timeless so we also have to pick pieces we are happy to have in our archive for years to come and this often means not following trends, instead searching for a more classic heirloom look and feel.
For our Dusk we knew we wanted a colourful pattern with rich jewel like tones. The original sheet was created using Gouache paints which are all mixed entirely by hand and by eye to get the desired colours. Paints are flicked from a fan brush on to a viscous substance called Carrageenan which is derived from an Irish Seaweed.
The pattern used is not based on a traditional marbled design, we wanted a pattern that felt loose, organic and contemporary and let the colours do the talking.
The image below is the original hand marbled paper:
The paper then gets sent to our wonderful friend Nicky who is a wizard at digitising the design and the all important part creating a seamless repeat. Sometimes we decide to enlarge the design a bit to make it a better fit in a room (rather than the more traditional use of covering a book!) and we sometimes tweak the colours, in this instance we made the orange more vivid to make it more visually striking.
We do always set Nicky up with quite the challenge....
'The beautiful, organic flow of Jemma's hand marbled papers is the exact reason why turning them into repeat patterns is quite so darn tricky!
Where little quirks and interesting marbling is perfect within the contains of a single page, when they appear in a repeat layout, suddenly strange faces or stark geometric patterns are all you can see!
Which leads to my job - identifying the 'faces', blending flourishes, stitching fans - with the end goal, to turn that original marbling into a section, that when repeated onto rolls of wallpaper looks and feels as close to that original hand marbled piece as possible, while covering 3 or 4 times bigger a space.' - Nicky Rowan
Nicky then sends us the digital file which goes straight to our printers along with a swatch of the original marbled paper as reference. For our printing we use a 4th generation family company who print luxury wallcoverings from their factory in Lancashire. We receive a large sized print back from them and have to decide if we sign-off or if need to make any changes. Sometimes we need to sample 2 or 3 times and invariably this comes down to tweaking colours, this is often made harder by the fact our original colours are hand mixed rather than coloured to colour chips.
For Dusk we decided to have this printed on Mica Coated fibrous non woven paper as it really helped to give the sheet its jewel like quality and live up to its col. name 'Tourmaline'. The inks used are water based, non toxic and environmentally safe.
Our wallpapers are printed to UK standard size of 10.05m x 52cm width and below you can see the impressive printer at work. You can just seen our Serpentine 'Spring' and Juniper 'Blue Anise' being digitally printed and we were lucky enough to be there to get to see production first hand.
Once we have signed off on a sample from the print house we can place an order for a production roll which can then be cut into A4 samples to send out into the world.
The final stage is getting to see our wallpapers in homes, hotels and more.
Please do share your projects with us as we really love to see them in situ.
Below we share a couple of images of the original hand marbled paper beside the digitally printed wallpaper which is glowing with its Mica finish and especially tactile due to the fibrous paper stock.
I hope you can agree that everyone involved does an amazing job and goes above and beyond to ensure we can offer you the highest quality product.
