The Collection

A Look at the perfect twin bedroom...

Tess Newall Shares Her Secrets!

Decorative artist and friend of Salvesen Graham, Tess Newall is known for exquisite hand painted murals and furniture in her signature artisanal style. Combining whimsical texture, delicate brushstrokes and an unmistakable colour palette, her pieces are bursting with character, making them as charming as they are covetable.

Having recently completed a project in her own home, a twin bedroom for her daughters which incorporates playful use of our Little Check Fabric...

Can you tell us how this room came together?
This is my daughters' shared bedroom, and it's small but with lovely high ceilings. I wanted to create a magical space for them, overgrown with wildflowers and sprawling vines which climbed the ceilings as well as the walls. I had this room in mind when creating my Secret Garden Wallpaper My husband Alfred Newall's twin Bobbin Beds fit perfectly in the space, and I just needed to work out how to canopy them on the slanted ceiling! Two brass poles was all it took, along with some ingenious work by Sussex Upholstery. I'm so pleased with how it turned out.

Do you have any tips for layering pattern and colour?
Don't overthink it and just try things which you love alongside one another - they usually work! I like rooms which feel as though they have evolved with time, so have a mismatched feel. Lampshades and cushions are the perfect things to experiment with - use different varieties of scale, colour and pattern.

What was the inspiration behind the Secret Garden Wallpaper?
It was inspired by an 18th-century hand-painted wallpaper I saw in a Swedish country house last summer. I loved how individual vines grew up from the ground, with flowers sprawling across the walls and meeting one another. When painting my own design, I gave the flowers a naive charm and chose colours which felt more contemporary and playful than the original inspiration. The wallpaper is printed using a traditional process where real paint is applied to the surface of the paper using rollers, which lends it a hand-painted and imperfect texture similar to my original paintings.

We just love the use of the Little Check Fabric for the canopies, how did you decide on these colours?
The raspberry and rose shades perfectly complement the wallpaper. I love how the rose almost looks as though it could be the underside of the raspberry; they work perfectly together tonally and I think it's fun having a pattern on the interior as well as the exterior of the canopy. More is more!