Pattern Is Not the Problem

All photos by Phil Whitbread

At some point, pattern got blamed for bad decorating.

A room felt busy? Too much pattern. A house looked dated? Pattern. Something felt slightly chaotic? Definitely the wallpaper.

And so we spent the better part of a decade removing it.

We painted over the flowers. We replaced the striped sofas. We rolled up the rugs with borders and medallions and tiny repeating vines. We bought plain curtains, plain bedding, plain sofas and enormous beige rugs that seemed specifically designed not to have an opinion.

Everything began to coordinate.

And somehow, everything also became a little less interesting.

The funny thing is, pattern was never really the problem.

Bad pattern is rarely about the pattern itself. It’s about fear.

The rooms that make pattern look terrible are often the ones where it has been treated like something dangerous. One floral cushion placed carefully on a beige sofa. A tiny patterned rug surrounded by acres of neutral. Wallpaper on exactly one wall because four walls apparently would have constituted some sort of emergency.

Pattern becomes awkward when we make it audition for the room.

Good rooms don’t do that.

They let pattern belong there.

Think about the houses you remember from childhood. Your grandmother’s curtains. The plaid blanket that was always on the sofa. The strange little floral paper in someone’s powder room. The striped awning outside the neighbourhood shop. The quilt at the cottage that probably contained six colours that had absolutely no business being together and yet somehow looked perfect.

Nobody was standing there asking whether the undertones matched.

That is part of what made those spaces feel alive.

Pattern is memory with a repeat.

Maybe that’s why we are drawn to old ones.

A faded cabbage rose. A tiny block print. Checks that look like they came from an old kitchen. Stripes that belong on a French mattress. Seventies geometrics. Little Victorian flowers. Patterns that have appeared on curtains, tablecloths, wallpaper and upholstery for generations.

They carry something with them.

A plain piece of fabric can be beautiful, but pattern gives you something to recognize.

And recognition is one of the things that makes a house feel like home.

There is also something wonderfully defiant about pattern now.

After years of interiors becoming increasingly easy to reproduce, pattern makes copying a room more difficult.

You can buy the same sofa. The same coffee table. The same pendant light. You can save the same Pinterest image and order nearly every object in it by Tuesday.

But then someone hangs a strange striped curtain they found at an estate sale.

Or wallpapers the ceiling.

Or puts a floral chair beside a plaid sofa.

Or throws a hundred year old rug underneath a very modern table.

Suddenly the formula falls apart.

And that is usually when the room gets good.

The best use of pattern is not to make a room look decorated. It is to make it harder to explain.

You should have to look twice.

There should be a moment where you think, I would never have put those together.

That moment is important.

Because taste does not really develop when everything agrees.

Taste develops when you learn which disagreements you like.

A stripe beside a flower. A geometric rug underneath an antique table. A tiny print against something enormous and graphic. Red where everyone else would have chosen cream.

These little collisions are where a room starts becoming specific to the person living in it.

And specificity is something interiors desperately need right now.

We have become very good at making beautiful rooms.

Maybe too good.

We know the formulas. We know the proportions. We know which wood tones are currently acceptable and which lamps are about to appear in every house on Instagram.

Pattern interrupts that.

It introduces risk.

It can be slightly too much.

And slightly too much is often far more memorable than perfectly enough.

So no, your patterns do not all need to match.

They do not need to come from the same collection.

They do not even necessarily need to make sense.

They just need to look like someone chose them because they loved them.

Because a house filled only with things that behave themselves may be tasteful.

But the house you remember?

There was probably something floral in it.

-Juliette