Last winter, I had a revelation. The setting: a second-hand bookshop. The catalyst: a faded picture of the bathroom carpet in David Hicks’s Britwell House, it’s wild Y-patterned carpet lifted from Owen Jones’s book The Grammar of Ornament. Tiles suddenly seemed oddly sterile, the Victorian floorboards round my own boxed-in tub ripe for covering with Brussels weave. Why slip around on waterproof surfaces when you could be wriggling your toes on the leopard-spot carpet Madeleine Castaing installed at Lèves? Who needs parquet flooring when you could follow Cecil Beaton’s lead and stitch artificial daisies into grass-green pile?
Like any good convert, I promptly turned evangelical, bombarding my group chats with pictures: a Pierre Frey carpet that riffed on Napoleon’s Château de Malmaison library; Sibyl Colefax John Fowler’s take on a Gothic-cross pattern from the 1830s. The publishable replies invariably contained some combination of “allergies”, “stains” and – when I mentioned fitting them in bathrooms – queasy-faced emojis. “Wall-to-wall is the decorating equivalent of skinny jeans,” argued one designer friend who’s fond of polished concrete. “It’s just too impractical to come back properly.” But what if that impracticality were part of the appeal? If I must live in Silicon Valley’s world, let my house feel like it’s being lived in by real humans – Malbec spills and wet footprints included.
“Having fitted carpets in bathrooms feels like it should be illegal, but actually it should
be encouraged,” agrees creative consultant Max Hurd, a wall-to-wall devotee whose own London terrace features a violet-floored attic. Other tastemakers concur. Beata Heuman recently installed a kelly-green Aronson’s carpet in the master bath of a client’s 1890s townhouse in New York, while Lauren Santo Domingo’s dressing room at her Hamptons retreat features a Cogolin design in pale cream. “For me, wall-to-wall carpeting is about bringing softness back into the equation,” says Liza Laserow Berglund, co-founder of Nordic Knots. “It changes the atmosphere immediately, making a room feel calmer, warmer and more inviting.” Launching this September, the Swedish textile company’s first wall-to-wall collection, Avenue, offers “understated” colours from moss green to chestnut.
For bolder hues, Sabine Getty recommends Sinclair Till. The Pimlico Road institution provided the “beautiful and theatrical” Coca-Cola-red carpet for the entrance hall in her Kensington townhouse, while she’s currently installing “vibrant and happy stripes” by Roger Oates in her New York home. If you’re particularly concerned about wear and tear, consider embracing even more elaborate patterns – and invest in a good carpet shampooer (Vax makes the best). The Carpet Society now offers 20,000 archival designs from 10 different labels, including Hicks’s geometric styles and Castaing’s botanical prints, which hide marks well. And if the worst happens, then you can always channel Castaing’s famous nonchalance. When, shame-faced, a client told the French decorator a dog had stained her carpets, her response was simply: “Excellent!”
