Working closely with the Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation, renowned British interiors brand Mini Moderns has created faithful reissues of two original Lucienne Day wallpaper designs.

“We are thrilled that my mother’s exquisite designs for wallpapers are being highlighted through this collaboration with Mini Moderns. Less well-known than her textiles, her wallpapers are equally brilliant mid-century designs which look perfectly at home in today’s interiors. Mini Moderns’ meticulous and patient attention to every tiny detail has resulted in beautifully authentic new productions which bring these historic designs back to vibrant life.”

Paula Day, Founder, Trustee & Chair of the Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation

“For us, the opportunity to collaborate with the Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation to create faithful reissues of Lucienne Day’s original wallpaper designs has been a dream project – and with invaluable support from the archivists at the Whitworth, the process has been a highly collaborative and rewarding experience.”

Keith Stephenson and Mark Hampshire, Mini Moderns

One of the twentieth century’s most influential British textile designers, Lucienne Day created visionary designs for textiles, wallpapers, carpets and ceramics, pioneering the post-war ‘Contemporary’ style. Graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1940, Lucienne’s breakthrough came with Calyx – the standout textile at the 1951 Festival of Britain, for which she also designed three wallpapers.

Mini Moderns designers, Keith Stephenson and Mark Hampshire have long admired the work of Lucienne Day, having first come across her designs in their teenage years. Of her groundbreaking approach to pattern design, they say: “We can only imagine what impact her exciting, optimistic designs must have had on post-war Britain. We admire her principled stance of harnessing the marriage of fine art and mass production, creating purposely affordable designs.”

The Whitworth in Manchester holds Lucienne Day’s personal collection of textiles and wallpapers, and it is here that Mini Moderns began the painstaking process of reproducing two of her original wallpaper designs. Mark and Keith identified two patterns from the 1950s that they felt epitomised Lucienne Day’s approach to wallpaper design: Provence (1951) and Syncopation (1958).

**Syncopation by Lucienne Day at Mini Moderns**

Featuring a mix of abstract and botanical icons within elliptical shapes, Provence was one of the three wallpapers that Lucienne Day designed for the 1951 Festival of Britain – the landmark exhibition that has long been a source of inspiration for Mini Moderns. Robin Day used Provence to decorate one of his room-sets, which also showcased his own furniture, so the design is inextricably linked to the Festival.

The original wallpaper was hand block printed by John Line and Sons for their Limited Editions 1951 collection. To emulate this technique would be difficult with any machine printing methods, so Mini Moderns collaborated with the Foundation to produce the design digitally, ensuring that Lucienne Day’s unique mark-making was reproduced as faithfully as possible, whilst losing none of the original’s quirks that resulted from block printing.

Syncopation (catalogued simply as C868 & C869) was the next design to inspire Mark and Keith. They were immediately drawn to its characterful mark-making – the abstract pattern of skilfully executed lines, dashes and dots forming a softly sophisticated vertical stripe, with an expressive visual rhythm that is quintessentially Lucienne Day.

Originally printed by WPM and marketed by Crown via The Architects’ Book of One Hundred Wallpapers, the design duo immediately recognised the method of production as ‘surface print’ – a traditional technique that was developed to replicate the rich textured effect of hand block printing. Since their Accrington-based wallpaper manufacturer specialises in this technique, they were confident of being able to achieve a very faithful reproduction of the original.

**Provence by Lucienne Day at Mini Moderns**

Mini Moderns have worked closely with their long-standing wallpaper manufacturer to identify the best production methods to replicate each of their chosen designs, meticulously colour matching them to the originals. The choice of substrate was an equally important factor in the process of reissuing these designs, and Mark and Keith selected an eco non-woven base, 79% of which is made up of natural, renewable fibres.

Available from £110 per roll at www.minimoderns.com | @minimoderns