Thank casual Fridays and the resultant decline in men’s neckties for the creation of Fromental, a leading designer of elegant silk wallcoverings. Seeking an alternative use for luxury silks, it was Tim Butcher’s eureka inspiration to combine fine chinoiserie silks with wallpaper. Partnering with designer Lizzie Deshayes, they created the firm (named after her great-grandparents) that for two decades has worked with Chinese craftspeople producing some of the finest bespoke, hand-painted, embroidered wallcoverings in the world. A new line of printed wallpapers was introduced this season. Married since they linked up creating Fromental, Tim and Lizzie live with their young daughter in a London flat with walls covered in some of their favorite patterns: Mishima, Travertine, Babinda, Kiku.
How is your original product different from conventional wallpaper?
The designs are hand-painted on silk, sometimes embroidered, then backed with rice paper to be applied to the wall.
What is the advantage of hand-painting and embroidering the silk?
When you’re painting with silk thread, you’re painting with light. There’s a luminosity, a beauty, intensity and subtlety of color that a painter can’t match. When you see it, you know it’s better.
What is the role of the Chinese artisans?
Each of them is an artist. Every detail is a conscious decision by an expert who choses which shades of silk for a bird or where to place a silk knot representing the pistil of a blossom. It may take 30–35 hours per panel. Every stitch is a bit of artistry.
What roles do you each play in the process?
Fifty/fifty. We are both heavily involved in design, but Tim has the ability to also be the business head.
Where do you get design ideas?
Tim is a colorist, he remembers breaking open a Chinese cake made of taro, sweet radish, and inside was the perfect grey/mauve colorway for soft spring flowers. Lizzie obsessed over a chrysanthemum on a glazed vase, which she eventually integrated with blossoms in a painting by Japanese artist Hokusai’s daughter Katsushika Oi. The result is the pattern Kiku.
With 60 standard designs available in 20–25 colorways, how do you designate the patterns?
We don’t do seasonal collections, so we use a “loose basket” of designations: Chinoiserie and Modern Chinois show flowers and animals, Roomskins is textural, non-pictorial. Conversational is from textile printing, a print made up of a motif from something recognizable.
What’s your best-selling pattern?
Prunus. Nature and flowers always work. Blossoms are beautiful—they carry any color and any technique very well. It doesn’t seem to alienate male or female—it’s very versatile.
How do you devise pattern names?
If you design it, you name it. It’s a feeling that comes to you. The design will tell you what its name is.
You’ve done collections with artists and firms—Lalique, GOOP, Amy Lau, Harris Reed—how do you select collaborators?
It’s most enjoyable to work with people who are hands-on makers, they understand how a piece is made. When a collaboration works, it expresses the core of both parties.
How do your products relate to fine art?
Historically, fine and decorative arts were allied, but Modernists considered decorative arts a kind of craft. We’re bringing the idea of decorative art back into the limelight.
If wallpaper is art, can you hang pictures on it?
Yes. It comes to life. It’s a background of living. Hanging paintings or mirrors is beautiful. Layering over it is the right thing to do.
Why are you introducing printed wallpaper?
It’s exciting to take really good design into technology. Not many people can commission a room of hand-painted silk. This makes it accessible.