Birmingham, Alabama-based interior designer Caroline Gidiere says the technique can both bring down the size of an over-scaled bedroom and also make a very small room seem larger by blurring its edges. “When the pattern is all over, it has an effect the opposite of what you might expect,” she explains. “The pattern loses its significance, almost the same as when you do a tonal room. When everything is the same, it’s hard to tell when one thing ends and another begins.” This, of course, also helps camouflage any design challenges, like poor architecture or ho-hum furniture.
A living room decorated by Caroline Gidiere.
Photo: Isabel Parra
She riffed on the sitting room of Lee Radziwill’s iconic Parisian apartment for a client who wanted a next-level sitting room. Gidiere covered “everything in the room that could be covered” in Le Manach’s Mikado, the same fabric used by Radziwill but in a blue colorway versus pink. It took 155 yards of the print to swath the walls, three pairs of drapery, and five pieces of upholstery.
“If you want a room to be iconic, this is a surefire way,” says Gidiere. “It’s likely to always be appreciated by a more refined or elite audience, as there’s a certain pocketbook required to accomplish it. And these are the types of people we look to for influence.”
Take, for example, the Southampton bedroom of Gloria Vanderbilt, a pattern-on-pattern room that, despite being decades old, still feels “fresh and inviting,” says Alexandra Resor, the Charleston-based interior designer of Lee Ann Thornton Interiors.