Fromental Brand Guidelines: The London House of Hand-Painted Silk Wallcoverings

Two textile designers and a London start-up.

Fromental is a London wallcovering house founded in 2005 by Tim Butcher and Lizzie Deshayes. The company says it makes hand-painted, embroidered and printed wallcoverings, and Business of Home, in a June 2023 write-up of a podcast interview with Butcher, describes both founders as textile designers who saw an opening to bring hand-painting to the medium of wallpaper. The magazine calls Deshayes a decorative painter; the company lists her as a director.

The founders came to wallpaper from different directions. Fromental says Butcher began his career in fashion, building the technology to hand paint fabrics for Parisian couture houses, and that time spent in Asia in his twenties drew him to traditional Chinese wallcoverings. Robb Report, in September 2025, adds that he once wove, printed and hand-painted silks for menswear brands and couture houses. The company says Deshayes wanted to design fabrics from early childhood, like her godfather, the textile designer John Allen, and that wallpapering sessions at home in her teens fixed her interest.

The start was small. Business of Home reported that in 2005, with the company newly launched and still run from a spare room in Butcher’s London home, the head of purchasing at Wynn Las Vegas, a hotel then not yet open, asked for a quote for hand-made wallpaper. Butcher flew to Fromental’s production studio in China; with no ordinary room large enough for the frames and panels, the work was set up on a local badminton court, and it took ten weeks and 220 embroiderers to deliver. Butcher told the podcast that the order gave the young firm commercial impetus and the belief that it could take on such work.

The same 2023 article reported that a corporate showroom in New York was opening that month, and that Fromental had recently worked with the interior designer Scott Maddux on a courtyard room for Wow!house at London’s Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, and supplied custom wallpaper for Timothy Corrigan’s room at the Kips Bay Decorator Show House in New York. Robb Report calls Fromental a British wallpaper house with studios in London and China, and the company describes Butcher and Deshayes as running the business together.

Painted in Wuxi, embroidered in Suzhou.

Fromental’s core is hand-painted silk chinoiserie. The company says the handmade silk chinoiserie wallcoverings that established its reputation are made in Wuxi, China, and that its embroidery studios are in a district of Suzhou where embroidery has been the main local industry for two thousand years. Its craftsmanship page describes raw silk sized with a natural adhesive, often brushed with iridescent pearl washes and backed with rice paper; embroidery uses ultra-fine unspun silk floss, hand-dyed in small batches, with up to six tones of one colour blended to build gradation.

Robb Report followed one design, Paradiso, through the process in September 2025. It describes bamboo shoots weaving through peonies and blossoms, with birds and butterflies above, and says the design draws on prints in the seventeenth-century Chinese painting manual The Mustard Seed Garden. Each commission begins with a hand-drawn miniature in the London studio; the silk, sourced from Huzhou, is stretched on a wooden frame, sized and backed with rice paper; in Wuxi the lead artists trace the projected design in pencil before a team of four to six junior painters lays in the opening layers of colour. The panels then go to Suzhou for embroidery, and a single mounting master in Wuxi applies the final layer of rice paper, after which the painters match the joins between panels.

Not everything is made by hand from start to finish. Fromental says all of its printed designs begin as hand-painted, full-scale artworks that are scanned at very high resolution, and that printed papers can then be hand-finished with painted details, lacquered glazes or metallic accents. It names gilding, Japanese goldwork, foiling and screen printing among the techniques it uses, and says it has been exploring 3D printing and puff-paint screen printing in work developed between its London and Wuxi studios.

The range is split in two. Bespoke collections, sold by enquiry and made to measure, include Chinoiserie, Lumiere, Modern Chinois and Ratio; a ready-to-order shop sells wallpapers such as Papier Chinois alongside artworks, cushions, throws and wall hangings. Collaborations form a third strand. Tatler reported in February 2019 on Hirondelles, a collection made with the French crystal house Lalique that pairs hand-painted silk with hand-embroidered flowers and crystal swallows that can be rearranged; the company’s current list also includes work with Harris Reed, Sophie Paterson, Natalia Miyar and Young Huh.

How wallpaper makers present themselves.

Wallpaper and wallcovering makers sell surfaces that are hard to judge from a small sample, so most of them present their work through finished rooms. Company sites typically pair each design with a flat pattern image and a room set, and many add project stories from hotels, shops and private houses. Fromental’s pages group bespoke designs by collection, by collaboration and by colour family, while Muraspec’s home page runs a series of short project stories from hotels, bars and homes.

Naming does a lot of the work. Makers organise their output into named collections, and the names often signal a source or a mood rather than a technical detail: Fromental lists collections such as Chinoiserie and Modern Chinois, and Muraspec trade write-ups from 2013 describe ranges named Artemis, Osaka and Verona. Collaborations with designers and other houses are usually given collection names of their own, as with Hirondelles, made by Fromental with Lalique and reported by Tatler in 2019.

Technique is described in plain terms. Makers set out how a design is produced, whether by hand painting, hand embroidery, screen printing or digital printing, and where the work is done. Fromental’s craftsmanship page explains how silk is sized, painted and backed with rice paper in its Chinese studios, and Muraspec states that its wallcoverings are designed and manufactured in the UK; trade magazines often repeat the specification details, such as backing and weight, that contract buyers ask for.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: who founded the business, who owns it now and where its studios and showrooms are. Some firms are still run by their founders, while others have passed through several owners; Muraspec, for example, now describes itself as employee-owned. The guides in this group set those facts out from dated sources, alongside each maker’s own account of its collections.

Birds, flowers and a bespoke service.

Fromental’s presentation follows its product. Its site groups bespoke wallcoverings by collection, by collaboration and by colour family, from neutral and monochromatic to pearlescent, pastel and metallic, and its craftsmanship pages are organised by technique: printed, hand-painted, hand-embroidered and needlepoint. Its design notes say that traditional Chinese painting draws on forms from nature, most often birds and flowers, and that this heritage remains the cornerstone of much of its own design, from a golden pheasant to a cherry tree in blossom.

Finished rooms carry the rest of the story. Robb Report lists the lobby of London’s Goring Hotel, rooms aboard the Lürssen superyacht Kismet and the morning room at Glenmorangie House in Scotland among the firm’s commissions. The company’s bespoke service offers made-to-measure panels laid out for curved walls, double-height rooms and complex architectural details, with support from design development through to installation, and Robb Report says the firm works with a global network of specialist installers.

Words do part of the work too. Deshayes is quoted on the company’s about page saying that craftsmanship means good use of tools and technology, and that painting onto silk was high tech at one time. Butcher told Business of Home that one way the firm keeps its niche is to do work that is probably too difficult for bigger firms with more resources.

For a design guide, Fromental shows how a young firm can build an identity on one demanding technique, hand-painted silk, and then extend it through print, hand-finishing and named collaborations while keeping the bird-and-flower language it started with. Compare it with the de Gournay and Zuber guides. For this guide we use silk jade, ink, pearl, peony and paper tones with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Fromental’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.