Galerie Wallcoverings Brand Guidelines: The Tonbridge Wallpaper House Founded in 1990

A Kent company with a 1990 start.

Galerie Wallcoverings is a British wallpaper company based in Tonbridge, Kent, and it trades through Galerie Limited. Companies House records the company as incorporated on 7 February 1990 under the name Gridgain Limited, and renamed Galerie Limited on 9 May 1990. It remains an active private limited company, and the business activity it registers is the wholesale of textiles.

The company’s own account matches that date. Its website says Galerie was “founded in 1990” and calls it a British wallpaper brand that has been changing interiors for more than 30 years, with a range that runs from contemporary to traditional designs, soft textures to bold patterns. It says it supplies both homes and commercial projects such as hotels, restaurants and offices.

Galerie presents itself as a collection house rather than a single studio. It says it offers “both our own brand ranges and exclusive designs imported from around the world,” and that it has more than a hundred collections to choose from. The company’s privacy notice describes how it works with shops: retailers hold its pattern books, and Galerie can dispatch orders on a retailer’s behalf.

Ownership is private. Companies House lists one person with significant control, holding 75 per cent or more of the shares and voting rights, with the entry notified in April 2016. The company also runs a separate website for customers in the United States, galerieinteriordesign.com, which carries the same company description and collections. For customers in Northern Ireland and the European Union, the company names Galerie Limited as the manufacturer of record and lists an authorised representative based in Tallinn, Estonia. Companies House shows its accounts made up to 31 March each year.

More than a hundred collections.

The company’s collections page is the clearest record of what Galerie sells, and it is long: several hundred collection names, many with numbered follow-up volumes. Some are long-running series. Italian Textures runs to four volumes, alongside related ranges called Italian Damasks, Italian Silks and Damasks, and The Classic Italian. Texture is a recurring theme elsewhere too, with collections named Natural Opulence, Urban Textures, Organic Textures and Grasscloth 2.

Another group carries Scandinavian names, among them Sommarang, Apelviken, Ekbacka and Skagen, next to collections called Hygge Home and Nordic Elements. Florals and period styles have their own ranges, such as English Florals, Blooming Garden, Arts and Crafts and Dutch Masters, and there are ranges for children’s rooms, among them Bambino, Tiny Tots and Just 4 Kids, as well as murals under the Welcome Home Murals name.

A number of collections carry outside names. The list includes Ted Baker Eden and Ted Baker Fantasia, Marimekko 5 and Marimekko Essentials, an ELLE Decoration range and a Disney range. Others are tied to designers and interiors names: Riviera Maison, and Off The Wall, listed under the name of the designer and broadcaster Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. The Style Sisters Classic collection is listed with its own paint shades, with names such as Dark Blue and Warm Nude, coded to match the papers.

Galerie’s product codes show how the catalogue is organised. Papers in the Llewelyn-Bowen range carry an LB prefix, the Style Sisters papers an SS prefix and many Italian Textures papers an IT prefix, while other collections use plain numbers. The site marks ranges as current or discontinued, so the list is also an archive of what the company has offered over the years.

Some series are named for finishes rather than places. Collections called Metallic FX, Special FX and Texture FX sit beside Classic Silks and Simply Silks, each numbered as new volumes appear, and stripes have their own run under Essential Stripes, Simply Stripes and Smart Stripes. The home page also features collections called Bombay Design, Ornamenta and Havana 2, showing how far the catalogue reaches beyond British and Scandinavian themes.

Design and documentation.

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.

Colour edits, pattern books and a visualiser.

Galerie’s website is organised around browsing. Its home page leads with edits by colour and theme rather than by designer, with headings such as “Explore Reds,” “Brown Is Back,” “Natural Textures” and a murals section, and it features collections such as Kumano, Salt and Pepper. Visitors can search the full catalogue by colour, design type and collection, and the site offers a room visualiser.

The same structure appears on both of its websites. The British site, galeriewallcoverings.co.uk, and the American site, galerieinteriordesign.com, share the company description and the collection pages, with the American version spelling the tool “Visualizer.” On social media the company uses the name Galerie Home, and its customer email address uses the same name. The brand’s voice on these pages is practical and broad: it speaks of palettes, finishes and room types rather than of a single house style or a named design studio.

That breadth is the brand. Galerie presents a large, changing catalogue, sold through retailers’ pattern books and online, and refreshed with new collections and licensed ranges. For residential buyers it offers florals, textures and children’s papers; for commercial projects it points to the same collections for hotels, restaurants and offices.

For a design guide, Galerie Wallcoverings shows how a wallpaper brand can be built on curation and catalogue structure as much as on a signature print. Compare Osborne & Little and Designers Guild, two other British wallpaper names. For this guide we use an ink blue, a sage and a terracotta with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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