How to Decorate With William Morris Prints: A Room-by-Room System

What decorating with Morris prints covers, and what it does not

The topic covers styling homes with Morris and Morris & Co. designs: wallpapers, furnishing fabrics and the prints derived from them. It is a practical craft, and it has a long pedigree. According to the V&A, paper printed with patterns has been used for decorating walls in Britain since the 16th century, and by the late 19th century wallpapers were widely used by all classes in homes and public buildings.

It is just as important to say what the topic does not cover. No historical room-by-room decorating advice from Morris, his firm or any museum source is on record for this guide. No quotation by Morris about decorating with prints appears in the source material either. So the framework here is built from the designs themselves: their pattern types, their colours, their scale and their making methods.

That constraint is workable. A pattern like Bird and Anemone tells you a great deal simply by being examined closely, and the V&A records behind these three designs give concrete details you can carry into your own rooms. The rest of this guide walks through them one at a time.

Key facts at a glance

Before the detail, here are the anchor facts for the three documented designs. Every row traces to the V&A's own object records, attributed in the text where the record rests on a single source.

Keep these three in mind as you read. Bird and Anemone shows how one pattern can exist in both fabric and wallpaper form. Indian and Wreath, both wallpapers, show how much character can differ between two designs made only a few years apart.

Bird and Anemone: a pattern for both fabric and wall

The V&A holds Bird and Anemone, a furnishing fabric with museum number O78906, with William Morris as primary maker and a primary date of 1882. According to the museum's record, the design was made by William Morris for Morris & Co. and is a block printed cotton, British, 1882.

The material details matter for decorating decisions. The V&A describes the piece as a dyed cotton ground with a block-printed pattern in red madder dye. That combination, a dyed ground with a single printed dye, gives the fabric its particular depth of colour rather than a flat, uniform surface.

Bird and Anemone also has a distinction that makes it unusually useful as a decorating reference. According to the V&A, it is one of the few repeating patterns William Morris (1834-1896) designed for both textiles and wallpapers. If you want one pattern language running through a room, on both walls and soft furnishings, this is the kind of design that was made to do exactly that.

The practical lesson is simple. When you pick a print for a room, check whether the pattern type exists in more than one medium. A design that was conceived for both fabric and wall, as this one was, gives you a documented precedent for carrying the same motif across surfaces.

Two wallpapers that show the range: Indian and Wreath

Indian and Wreath make a useful pair because they differ in date, character and construction. According to the museum's record, it is a colour woodblock print in distemper on paper, a formalised foliate design, brown on a pink ground, published by Morris & Co.

The specimen comes with context. A pattern book like that is a reminder that these designs were sold as a coordinated range, which is a sensible model for anyone decorating a whole home today.

Wreath, by contrast, is dated 1876. The V&A holds it as a wallpaper specimen, museum number O248613, primary maker William Morris, place England. The museum describes it as a foliate pattern of entwined green leaves and blue flowers, a print on paper by William Morris, part of Volume 1, a pattern book containing 25 Morris & Co. patterns from 1862-81.

Put side by side, the two records give you concrete variables to weigh. Wreath is a foliate pattern of entwined green leaves and blue flowers, dated 1876 on its record. Colour pairing, motif character and date all differ, and those are precisely the levers you pull when deciding what suits a given room.

If you are weighing several patterns against each other for one space, the cluster guide on mixing Morris patterns works through the combinations in more detail than this hub can.

How these designs were made, and why it matters for decorating

Knowing how a design was made helps you judge how it will behave on a wall. Take Bird and Anemone. The V&A holds it as a furnishing fabric, museum number O78906, with William Morris as primary maker and a primary date of 1882. The museum's record describes it as designed by William Morris for Morris & Co., a block printed cotton, British, 1882, with a dyed cotton ground and a block-printed pattern in red madder dye.

The V&A also notes that Bird and Anemone is one of the few repeating patterns William Morris (1834-1896) designed for both textiles and wallpapers, and that it was one of three monochrome patterns Morris designed to be printed by the indigo-discharge printing method, a method that had preoccupied him since 1875.

The making story continues in the workshop record. Experiments using indigo for these designs started in April 1881 at Morris's workshop in Queen Square in London, and were successfully printed after he moved into his factory at Merton Abbey, Wimbledon, London, in June the same year.

The wallpapers carry their own making details. The Wreath wallpaper was printed using wood-blocks cut by a family firm, Barrett's in Bethnal Green, who dealt directly with Morris's firm in the transfer of designs. The London firm Jeffrey & Co., which specialised in high quality 'Art' wallpapers, printed them in distemper, water-based colours which gave a thick chalky effect.

This craft context matters when you decorate with it. In Britain, paper printed with patterns has been used for decorating walls since the 16th century, and by the late 19th century wallpapers were widely used by all classes in homes and public buildings. A print drawn from this tradition sits in a long lineage of patterned walls, which is worth remembering when you decide how boldly to use it.

Where the record is uncertain

A decorating guide is only as good as its honesty about gaps, so here are the three uncertainties in the record behind this page.

First, dating. The V&A dates Bird and Anemone variously as 1882, before June 1881, and 1882-1919. The museum's own records disagree with each other on this point, so any single date should be treated as provisional.

Second, attribution. The V&A lists William Morris as primary maker of the Indian wallpaper, but the same record states that it was possibly designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. Both positions come from the same object record, so the designer of this particular wallpaper is not settled.

Third, an incomplete source. One V&A excerpt states that between 1875 and 1885 the firm greatly expanded its range, but the sentence is truncated in the material on record, so the full detail of that expansion cannot be quoted here. None of these gaps changes the practical framework above, but they are worth knowing before you repeat any of these facts elsewhere.

Where to go next

This page is the hub of a cluster, and each sub-topic below has its own guide. Pick the one that matches your room or your next decision.

Cluster guides linked from this hub:

• Choosing a design: the main Morris guide walks through individual patterns and how to pick one.
• Combining patterns: mixing Morris patterns without clashing, for rooms that carry more than one design.
• Walls of art: Morris gallery walls in detail, for building a display rather than a single hanging.
• Contemporary rooms: Morris in modern homes in detail, for pairing these designs with current interiors.