A room that deserved to stay itself.

A long overdue blogpost. On a Desfossé et Karth wallpaper reconstructed for a private residence in Ghent — and on the particular gratitude you feel when someone trusts you with something they love.

Some projects arrive differently. Not with a brief and a budget, but with a house, a history, and a very quiet kind of trust. This was one of those.

A family in Ghent had been living in their house for decades. They had renovated it carefully and lovingly over the years, keeping the original details, restoring what could be restored, letting the house remain what it was rather than making it into something new. The kind of renovation that takes patience and a real understanding of what a building is.

In one of the rooms, the original wallpaper had been there as long as they had. A Desfossé et Karth design from around 1920, a French manufacturer whose wallpapers were among the finest of their era. The paper had aged alongside the family, alongside the children who grew up in the house. It had become part of the room in the way that only time can make something part of a room. But it was worn beyond saving. The jute backing was detaching. It could not be conserved. It needed to be replaced.

They looked for years. They could not find anything that was right, not digitally printed reproductions, not modern wallpapers that approximated the period, not anything that would have been honest to the room. Then they heard about us.

We were invited to the house. They showed us the room, the wallpaper, the fragments that still held. They explained what they wanted: the same wallpaper, reconstructed as faithfully as possible. And then they said something that has stayed with us. They wanted it installed on fabric, on linen, the traditional way, because they didn't want to change the acoustics of the room.

“They didn’t want to change the acoustics of the room. That is not a technical specification. That is a love letter to a house.”

We went back to the atelier and started from the fragments. Vicky reconstructed the background colours, two transparent layers of distemper, built up carefully to match what the original would have been before decades of light and life had softened it. We redrawn the pattern, cut new pearwood blocks, and submitted a test print and colour card for approval before anything committed itself to full production.

The printing followed: background painted by hand first, two people working in rhythm, Dimitri loading the paint fast across the sheet, Vicky immediately behind him with a fine brush laying it into a strokeless layer. The sheets hung to dry. Then the pattern, block by block, colour by colour, exactly as it would have been in the original workshop.

The installation was on linen, the traditional method, new fabric stretched on the existing timber framework, grounded, the printed sheets hung without synthetic adhesives. The room breathes. The acoustics are unchanged. The wallpaper is, as far as we can make it, the same one that was always there.

On being given a chance.

We think about this project a lot. Not because it was technically the most complex thing we have done, though it was demanding, but because of what it represented. These were people with a genuine heart for their house and a genuine understanding of craft. They knew the difference between a handmade reconstruction and a digital print. They chose the real thing, not because it was easier or cheaper, it was neither, but because the room deserved it.

In a world where everything is becoming increasingly perfect, increasingly frictionless, increasingly reproducible, there is something quietly radical about a family that says: we want the actual thing, made the actual way, by people who know what they are doing. Finding people like that, people who look at a worn, beautiful, irreplaceable piece of printed history on their wall and decide it is worth reconstructing properly, is not something we take for granted.

So this is a thank you. To a family in Ghent who gave us one of the most meaningful commissions we have had. Who understood what we were trying to do before we had fully proven we could do it. Who cared about the sound of a room as much as the look of it. That kind of client doesn't just commission a wallpaper. They give you a reason to keep going.