Hand painted murals, designed for your space alone

Hand painted, not printed

Printed wall murals and printed chinoiserie wallpaper come off a roll in set widths, with seams and a repeat. A hand painted mural is drawn to your exact wall, around your doors, windows, alcoves and ceiling line, with depth and brushwork a print cannot copy. It can be changed as it develops, and it is one of a kind.

A short history of murals

30,000 years ago

The first painted walls

The caves of Chauvet in the Ardèche hold over a thousand drawings made 30,000 years ago or more, and Lascaux in the Dordogne, painted around 20,000 years ago, has nearly 6,000 figures. Painting on walls is one of the oldest things people do.

Around 1400 BC

Palaces and tombs

Around 1400 BC the palace at Knossos on Crete was painted with the famous bull leaping fresco, now in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. The tomb paintings of Nebamun from Thebes in Egypt, painted around 1350 BC, have been in the British Museum in London since 1821.

Around 70 BC

Roman rooms

Wealthy Romans painted whole rooms from floor to ceiling. The Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, painted in true fresco around 70 to 60 BC, was buried by Vesuvius in AD 79 and rediscovered in 1909.

1303 to 1305

True fresco

In buon fresco the colour is brushed onto damp lime plaster and becomes part of the wall as the lime sets. In Padua, Giotto painted the Scrovegni Chapel between 1303 and 1305 in about 625 day sized patches of fresh plaster, and the city’s fresco cycles are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

1508 to 1512

The Renaissance ceiling

Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome between 1508 and 1512, and it was unveiled on 1 November 1512.

The 1700s

Chinoiserie comes to Britain

In the 1700s hand painted Chinese wallpapers arrived in British country houses. National Trust houses still have them, including Felbrigg in Norfolk, Saltram in Devon, Blickling in Norfolk and Nostell in Yorkshire, where Chippendale’s firm hung the paper in 1771.

From 1922

Murals for everyone

From 1922 in Mexico City, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros painted public walls for the government, and the modern mural movement spread around the world.

Chinoiserie wallpaper, painted by hand

Chinoiserie is the European love of Chinese style, and its most famous form is the hand painted wallpaper of blossom, branches, birds and garden scenes that British houses prized in the eighteenth century. Today most chinoiserie wallpaper is printed. We paint it by hand, straight onto your wall or onto gold leaf, silver leaf or grasscloth, drawn to your room so the branches climb around your doors and windows rather than repeating off a roll.

What we paint

Murals on plaster

A mural painted over a limewash or marmorino background picks up the soft movement of the plaster underneath, which gives the painting an aged, fresco like depth. If you are planning a plastered wall and a mural together, we can do both.