House
The Atelier
Behind every Radius wallcovering is a sequence of slow, deliberate crafts, several of which have barely changed in two hundred years. This is how a panel comes to be.
Design and Motif
Every pattern begins as a hand-drawn study before it is ever digitised or hand-painted, whether that's a chinoiserie crane, a Rococo scroll, or a trailing bloom, sized and adjusted to the scale of the room it is destined for. We rarely repeat a bespoke motif exactly twice; scale, colourway, and placement are almost always adapted to the commission.
Hand-Painted Panels
Our hand-painted wallcoverings are built up in layers of pigment on prepared silk or fine paper ground, in the tradition of the eighteenth-century chinoiserie panels that inspired them. A single large panel can take a skilled painter days to complete, with each layer left to cure before the next is applied, and fine detail, like a bird's feather or a blossom's edge, finished last, entirely by hand.
Gold Leaf
Gilded detailing is applied using genuine gold leaf, laid sheet by sheet onto a prepared size layer and burnished by hand to bring out its depth. This is unforgiving work: leaf is fragile enough to tear at a breath, and a gilder learns to work in still air, with patience measured in hours rather than minutes.
Silk Jacquard
For our woven wallcoverings, we work with silk jacquard, a technique where the pattern is woven directly into the fabric structure rather than printed on top of it, so the motif catches the light differently depending on where you stand in the room. This is the same principle used in the finest Rococo-era silk damasks, produced today with modern precision but the same handwoven integrity.
Framing and Finishing
Where a piece is destined for a hand-carved frame, our woodworkers shape and gild the moulding separately, echoing the scrollwork of a Louis XV boiserie panel, before the wallcovering is fitted and the whole piece is finished as one composed object rather than two.
Quality Control
Before any commission leaves the atelier, it is inspected under natural and artificial light for colour consistency, seam alignment, and finish integrity, the same standard we would want walking into our own home.
Curious about a bespoke commission? Reach us through our contact page.