William Morris Dining Room Ideas

A dining room the firm decorated: where the ideas come from

The clearest precedent for a Morris dining room is a commission, not a private house. In 1866 the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was asked to decorate the Dining Room at the South Kensington Museum, the institution now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum. Within a few years the company had also secured two prestigious London jobs: decorating two rooms at St James's Palace and the West Dining Room of the South Kensington Museum, which the V&A records were renamed in 1899.

The V&A dates the founding of the company to William Morris (1834 to 96), who started it with a group of fellow artists and designers. According to the V&A's account, the work of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. became fashionable after the 1862 International Exhibition, which brought in a range of decorating jobs.

For the museum dining room, the V&A describes a restful, blue-green scheme created by Morris and his collaborators, chiefly the architect Philip Webb and the painter Edward Burne-Jones, for one of three new spaces the Museum had dedicated to refreshments. The V&A holds that the scheme was influenced by the Gothic Revival and medieval style. That combination, calm colour with dense pattern, is the core idea this guide builds on.

What the surviving design shows about planning a room

One surviving sheet shows how the firm thought about a dining room as a whole. The V&A lists a design for the ceiling of the Green Dining Room, museum number O88998, dated 1866 to 1867, and names Philip Webb (Speakman) and William Morris as its designers. The V&A describes it as a collaboration between Morris and Webb, who is better known as an architect.

The sheet itself is a working object. It is executed in pencil, charcoal and watercolour on a sheet collaged from four pieces of paper, and its surface carries splashes of paint. The V&A suggests those splashes mean the design was used for reference in the workshop rather than kept clean as a presentation drawing.

What the design shows is a method. It mixes stylised foliage and more organic motifs with a geometric structure, and it assumes that every surface of the room above the dado was to be decorated, ceiling included. Nothing was left plain by default; pattern and structure were decided together, surface by surface.

For a home dining room the lesson is not to paper the ceiling, but to plan the room as one composition. Decide which surfaces carry pattern and which stay quiet before you buy anything.

Choosing a pattern that suits a dining room

The Victoria and Albert Museum describes Pimpernel as an almost symmetrical pattern of entwined foliage and pimpernel plants with small flowers, block-printed by hand in distemper colours on paper. William Morris designed it, the design was registered in 1876, and Jeffery & Co. printed it for Morris & Co. The Museum also records that the pattern was hung in the dining room at Kelmscott House, the London home of William Morris, which makes it a documented example of a Morris pattern chosen for a dining room.

Colour and pattern balance

The documented scheme for the museum dining room gives you a palette to copy. According to the V&A, Morris, Webb and Burne-Jones created a restful, blue-green scheme, one the Museum describes as influenced by the Gothic Revival and medieval style. Restful is the operative word for a room where people sit for an hour or more.

In practice that means one pattern leads and everything else supports it. If the walls carry a dense foliage design, keep the curtains, rug and table linen plain or lightly textured. If the walls stay painted, a single large print or a framed pattern panel can carry the room on its own.

Blue-green is a useful starting point because it sits well with dark wood furniture and with the deep reds and ochres often found in Morris patterns. If you want to go further with combining designs, the journal has a separate guide to more on mixing Morris patterns without clashing more on mixing Morris patterns.

Scale, placement and formats

Match the scale of the pattern to the wall it sits on, and give a strong design enough clear space around it so it can be read as a whole rather than cut off by doorways, windows or furniture.

A note on the name of the room

One detail in the record is unsettled, and it is worth being straightforward about it. The V&A's account of the 1866 commission describes it as a commission to decorate the Dining Room at the South Kensington Museum, and the surviving ceiling design is titled for the Green Dining Room. Another V&A record refers to the same period commission as the West Dining Room of the South Kensington Museum. The two names appear to refer to the same job, but the evidence here does not reconcile them, so both are given.

It is also worth knowing the limits of the record. The evidence behind this page covers the ceiling design in detail but does not document the full scheme of wall and dado decoration for that room, nor the date when Pimpernel was hung at Kelmscott House. Where this guide describes the complete look, it is working from the documented colour and structure, not from a full surviving specification.

Mistakes to avoid and an example scheme

The most common errors are easy to list. Competing patterns, where two dense designs fight across walls and curtains, is the first. Overloading every surface is the second; the museum ceiling design planned every surface deliberately, not accidentally, and a home room rarely needs the same coverage. The third is choosing a pattern at swatch scale and discovering too late that it needs a whole wall to work.

Here is one worked scheme using the documented elements. Paint the walls in a quiet blue-green, the colour family the V&A records for the museum dining room. On the widest wall, hang a large foliage-led print, choosing a design with the same qualities as Pimpernel: entwined foliage, small flowers, an almost symmetrical structure. Keep the remaining walls plain, dress the table in plain linen, and let dark wood furniture carry the weight.

If the room is small, invert the scheme. Keep the walls painted and quiet, and use one framed pattern piece as the single strong note. The restful effect comes from restraint, not from coverage.