New new new new new new new....mew mew mew mew!  Cavalcade of cats wallpaper now available!

Cavalcades usually parade noisily through the streets but this happy gathering sits on the wall, happily watching the world go by.  The Cavalcade of Cats wallpaper is a tribute to all cats whose primary pursuit in life is to keep an eye on things.  Their mysterious presence, and strong sense of independence, not to mention endless curiosity (and even superiority) is celebrated in this majestic collection of cat portraits.  Charlotte Cory, who owns a dog would say that Cho-Cho, the siamese cat of her childhood was her first love. "The kitten arrived when I was ten years old and I was terrified of this tiny fierce little tiger, all of six inches long.  I remember the day I woke up with him on my pillow.  His eyes were open looking at me and I looked back at him.  I still keep his photograph above my desk - black and white, but with his bright eyes tinted blue.  Everywhere I go I spot cats silently looking on.  They are the most wonderful creatures on earth (apart, of course, from dogs)."

Country Life, November 2016 - interiors article on new wallpapers

"Although artists from Picasso to Andy Warhol explored the possibilities of designing textiles and wallpapers, the former declared that his designs should never be used for upholstery.  Picassos can be leaned against but not sat on....  Extraordinary things can happen, not least in the hands of Charlotte Cory..."

Stop Press:       NEW, Summer 2019:  "At the Art Gallery wallpaper" in three colourways as below - which do you prefer?  The correct answer is of course, it depends on the room and the wall!!

About the "At the Art Gallery" wallpaper. ( June 2019)

I have owned this beautiful antique wallpaper block for over 30 years.  I bought it in a junk shop in Chester back in the days when I was doing woodcut illustrations for bookcover and magazines and trying to finish a PhD in Medieval Literature.  I had it hanging over my printing press for years, occasionally taking it down, dusting it off, rolling ink over it and making a print.  Then, last year, when I went to the wonderful factory that prints the wallpaper, the guy working the press started to tell me about old-fashioned wallpaper printing using blocks like these and I recalled I had one, staring me in the face every time I print anything!  I vowed to go home, print it up and turn it into a wallpaper.  This I have done with spectacular results.  I love the block design on its own but then it seemed a good idea to hang some of my pictures on it.  So, while the National Portrait Gallery ought to take note of the personages in my Portrait Gallery wallpaper, the National Gallery next door might appreciate my rival At the Art Gallery wallpaper.  Every picture hanging on it has a story (of course) - in fact, many of them have been exhibited, some at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.  One of them is currently shortlisted for this year's show.  So you see, great excitement in the Cory atelier....

"I was delighted when I was approached me a few years ago with a view to designing some artists' wallpapers.  I love wallpaper.  I realized as I started to work on some designs how much I have always been slightly obsessed by it.  It is the first thing I look at when I go to people's houses.  I must seem very rude as i stare at their walls.  I remember the wallpapers long after I have forgotten the people who put them on those walls.  I can recall just about every wallpaper I have ever lived with.   And most of the wallpapers I have encountered over the years in hotels.  Those gi-normous parrots, for example, at Chalons sur Saone (the birthplace of photography); that busy roofscape imitating the roofs outside in an (expensive but shabby) attic room in Paris.  Montmartre, of course. 

This longstanding interest is probably because of strong childhood memories of my mother constantly changing the wallpaper in our North London semi-detached.  Sometimes every week.  It occasionally felt like every night.  I would come home from school, or wake up in the morning, and find my father - with barely suppressed ill temper  - perched up a ladder, bucket of paste in one hand, wide gunky glue brush in the other, and my mother gaping furiously at the walls, fretting over the new paper that was half way covering the old one; invariably deciding that she probably preferred the one he had put up three weeks before but which was now long since covered over and irretrievable.  Any comment from me usually resulted in a "clip round the ear", first from her, and then - when I protested vociferously - from him.  I used, though, to enjoy making wallpaper parcels out of the pasted, cut strips left lying around.  And I also used to enjoy the Saturday morning expeditions to the wallpaper showroom where (unlike my bored siblings) I would paw through the enormous sample books of wallpapers almost as obsessively as my poor mother.  Not that she ever sought, or listened to my opinions on the patterns.  She had her own strong preferences.  And the house, with every wall completely different and changing all the time, was testimony to her busy and wildly eclectic taste.  Now, of course, I understand she was probably expressing her dissatisfaction with life, and with being stuck with four children before the age of thirty.  She obviously hoped she could make her lot better and happier by changing the walls.  And she had a point.  You can completely transform a room, and your mood, and your whole outlook on life, by getting the wallpaper right....

​© Charlotte Cory 2018

The three different colourways of Charlotte Cory's National Portrait Gallery.  note:  the idea to use both colourways and make the wall stripy was mine!  It works very well, making the frames stand out even more from the wall.  Try it someone!

There are now two other colourways, a powder blue and a dark blue...

Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit....

You just can't get enough of them: A rabbits only version of the popular Portrait Gallery wallpaper featuring (amongst other celebrities) the Empress Josephine.

At the moment these cushions (that were devised to go with the wallpapers) are no longer made and are now collectors' items.