Nest & Nurtured

The blade slides beneath aged paper, separating decades from plaster. She works slowly, careful not to tear what she's uncovering: beneath magnolia woodchip lies mustard velvet flock, beneath that a William Morris acanthus in faded green, deeper still a hand-blocked geometric from perhaps the 1920s, and finally, against the original plaster, fragments of something older, a pattern so worn the design barely registers. Five layers. Five families. Five distinct moments when someone stood in this room and decided: this pattern, this colour, this is what we want surrounding us.

The smell is particular: wheat paste gone sour, pigment oxidised, paper fibres returning to pulp. Her hands work the scraper whilst her mind works the archaeology. Each layer a choice about beauty, about fashion, about what walls should say when they stop being merely structural and become expressive.