An enduring love of wallpaper and the decorative arts led Tim Butcher and Lizzie Deshayes to revive the craft of wallcoverings for the 21st century
Whenever a new client meets Fromental’s Tim Butcher and Lizzie Deshayes to discuss their bespoke wallpaper requirements, the duo’s first question often raises an eyebrow. How, they want to know, should the room feel? Not how do you want it to look, or how are you planning to use the space; those queries come later. That’s because at the heart of what Fromental does with its astounding colours, patterns and designs is create a mood.
“I would ask you to close your eyes, cast your mind back to your childhood and see the wallpaper in your parents’ or grandparents’ house,” Lizzie explains. “How does that make you feel? And all of a sudden you are there, you can smell the room. It’s really incredible.”
Lizzie has had a personal and visceral connection to patterned wallcoverings since she was a small child. “When I was growing up, the wallpaper going up our stairs was from the 1950s. It had a certain smell, a certain design and colour. I understood that it was older than me,” she recalls. “Then there was the paper that my mother installed in my room in the 1970s, which I hated. It was roses, made up of circles, all in pinks.” She makes a face. “I was always picking at it in a vain attempt to remove the whole thing.”
Faced with these raggedy edges, Lizzie’s mother told her that, when she was 18, she could always start her own business. It took until 2005 but she got there in the end, and today Fromental is world-renowned for its magnificent hand-painted and embroidered wallpapers.
The company’s roots are in the late 1990s, when Lizzie was a mural painter, adorning children’s bedrooms in the mansions of Chelsea and Norfolk. On one of those jobs she met Tim, whose background in fashion had led him to work with heritage wallpaper brand De Gournay.
This was not an auspicious moment for exuberant prints and bold colours. With the exception of the most traditional English country houses, the dominant style was Kelly Hoppen’s beige-and-pebbles minimalism.
In many of the houses where Lizzie was working her magic in the nursery, every other room was white. Yet Tim, who had absorbed the decorative arts during childhood outings to grand country piles, had a feeling that it was time to drag wallpaper towards the new century. “When I worked at De Gournay, I saw the transformative possibility of these beautiful things,” he says. “I remember the first blank room I worked on. We installed it in one day and the transformation was so powerful. There are few things that can change the entire atmosphere, energy and emotion of a space as completely as wallpaper. It’s all down to the artistry that’s in it.”
At that point it was a minority opinion but Tim took the long view. “Wallpaper moves in and out of fashion. Anything from the 19th century makes a statement – those papers were all richly decorated, as were the revivals in the 1920s and ’30s. It has always been niche. How could we take it forwards while still referencing the past? The niche was there; what could we do with it now?” For his answer, Tim looked east. He already had great contacts in China and a deep love of that nation’s classical designs and techniques. These came together in Fromental’s first production, Unconscious Nonsuch. It’s still available today.
The couple hung it in their bedroom in Maida Vale where it gave them everything they wanted from a wallcovering, and more. “The joy it brought was immeasurable,” Tim recalls. Here, in a mansion block in west London, was the magic that he had seen with historic Chinese rooms. The difference was that this design – a European take on chinoiserie, with lilies, apple blossom, birds and butterflies – was brand new.
Fromental papers are produced by teams of artists in a studio in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai in eastern China. They work in a systematic way that would not be possible in the UK, where art schools stress individuality and ideas over craft and consistency. Tim explains: “In China, painters all study the same forms, the same series of block prints; they copy and learn the shapes, the techniques, the forms. It means you can have 30 artists who can inhabit the style and do the same thing.”
At the Fromental studio, quality is overseen by Master Wang. Tim and Lizzie are both in awe of his skills. For Lizzie, he embodies the essence of the Chinese method. “They don’t paint the flower, they paint the essence of the flower. It’s not a copy, it is a flower but it’s a stylisation of everything within that. You feel the bud opening. You get that same joy that you get in nature. It doesn’t capture it, it expresses it.”
Master Wang’s masterworks, and Fromental’s other lush designs, grace some very exclusive walls. A lot of the company’s bandwidth is currently going towards the $4bn Wynn casino currently under construction in Dubai.
Tim, who meshes his creative background with the practical side of the business, relishes the challenge of a huge space. At the planning stage another casino warned him that the 12m-high walls might pose a challenge. His response: bring it on. One of the firm’s most bonkers commissions was London’s Goring Hotel, where a second look at the panoramic wallpaper reveals a unicorn, walruses and a gorilla in a barrister’s wig.
Fromental’s work with leading interior designers such as Russell Sage at the Goring or Sophie Paterson often lead to formal collaborations. The Fromental by Sophie Paterson collection allows clients who are too cautious for the full birds-and-bamboo experience to incorporate decorative elements in baby steps.
In 2019, Tim and Lizzie had the chance to work with Lalique. It was, Tim says, “a dream collaboration. We were working with craftsmen, passionate about what they do. The company still embodies René Lalique’s chutzpah, industry and design. To be invited into that, go into those archives, it was joyous.”
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