EMERY WALKER’S HOUSE
Staring
AT THE FOUR WALLS If you’re going to be staring at the four walls of your home they’d better be good looking walls! Lucinda MacPherson examines the Arts& Crafts wallpapers of Emery Walker’s house in Hammersmith. If walls could talk, the beautifully covered ones at Emery Walker’s House at 7 Hammersmith Terrace would speak the language of Arts & Crafts, an influential Victorian aesthetic influencing homes to this day. For this house museum belonged to a key member of the Arts and Crafts movement, and its walls are clad in original Morris & Co hand-blocked wallpapers communicating the movement’s social and aesthetic aspirations. William Morris, a close friend of Walker, railed against the rapid social change brought on by the industrial revolution, extolling the virtues of the medieval guild made up of skilled craftsmen and women who created handcrafted items from good quality materials. These ambitions are evident in his wallpapers, as Morris’s company rejected mass-produced roller printing, introduced in the 1840s, in favour of hand-cut wallpaper blocks which had to be printed individually. Each part of this time-consuming process (only one
26
colour could be printed a day, as it had to dry before the next block was applied) demanded a team of skilled artisans. Despite his best intentions to bring high quality craft to the masses, Morris’s production techniques were prohibitively expensive. St James’s Palace boasts Morris’s most expensive paper which involved a grand total of 68 print blocks. All of Morris’s designs at 7 Hammersmith Terrace are inspired by nature and some are instantly recognisable to the contemporary viewer. If you watch Channel 4’s Gogglebox, you will know ‘Willow Bough’ for the way it envelops Mary Killen and Giles Wood as they watch TV, with the curtains, wallpaper and chair cover all of the same pattern. “It does make us look a bit obsessive” Mary admits. A sharp-eyed Jennifer Saunders, watching the programme, spotted its comedic value and turned it into a comedy sketch in her 2017 Christmas show, with herself as Mary, dressed head to toe in ‘Willow Bough’ pattern fabric and all but disappearing in the foliage.
f @outandaboutmagazines
@outaboutmag
www.outaboutmagazine.co.uk
