Home is where the art is: from Picasso cushions and Van Gogh murals to Bonnard teatowels, mock up a masterpiece on your home furnishings

Londoners are declaring their love of art on their walls, bed linen, rugs and cushions.
Henri Rousseau wall print, £139.90 per sq m from Andrew Martin's National Gallery range
Barbara Chandler5 February 2019

Londoners love art, with gallery blockbusters selling out like musicals. Now art is moving off walls and on to rugs, cushions and bed linen.

At Andrew Martin, the exotic décor store in South Kensington, they’ll morph any image from 2,500 pictures at the National Gallery into high-resolution wall murals.

The Impressionists are popular, as is Rousseau’s tiger.

David Harris, design director, advises: “Visit the gallery and fall in love with a painting, or even a detail which we can enlarge to show the brush strokes.”

Sunflowers mural by Vincent Van Gogh, from £65 per square metre at surfaceview.co.uk

The Surface View website, selling murals, wall panels, canvases, blinds and window film, offers images from 14 galleries and museums.

The big names are there — the V&A, the National Portrait and National Galleries — but so are intriguing niche outfits such as the National Railway and Postal Museums.

Coffee tea towel: Bonnard's 1915 painting has been made into a £10 tea towel at the Tate

At the museums themselves, products linked to current shows are reliable for revenue, and don’t get repeated.

You can currently snap up a Bonnard or Burne-Jones tea towel for £10 at Tate Modern, where David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash is still selling as a jaunty cushion cover for £20.

Pop go interiors: David Hockney's A Bigger Splash cushion covers, £20 at Tate Modern (shop.tate.org.uk)

Using tapestry rather than printing, The Conran Shop does a set of Picasso cushions, priced £99.

Picasso Femme en vert et mauve woven cushion, £99 (conran.co.uk)

Limited-edition rugs

Arriving at Ikea this spring are limited-edition rugs by eight contemporary artists, based in the US, France, Korea, Japan and Poland, coming not only from the worlds of art and sculpture but also from tattoo parlours, graffiti and fashion.

“These rugs are exclamation marks in the home, whether you walk all over them or hang them on a wall,” says Henrik Most, creative leader for the project.

Limited edition: Japanese artist Misaki Kawai's lion family handmade rug features in Ikea's Rugs as Art in the Home event, launching later this year

In 1991, three years after setting up in business, Chelsea rug maker Christopher Farr initiated a radical show with the Royal College of Art called Brave New Rugs.

Now he is crafting rugs for a mammoth fundraising project curated by Artwise for the WWF. It’s called Tomorrow’s Tigers — or TX2.

There are fewer than 4,000 tigers left in the wild, and the push is to double them by 2022.

Tomorrow's tigers: 10 renowned artists have teamed up for a mammoth fundraising project curated by Artwise for the WWF

Supporting the cause, with tigers as their theme, 10 renowned artists including Gary Hume, Anish Kapoor and Rose Wylie have made rugs which are on open show and to buy at Sotheby’s, 33-34 New Bond Street, W1, now until February 4 (wwf.org.uk/tomorrowstigers) with prices from £10,000.

Gary Hume, whose tiger-themed rug is on sale at Sotheby's for £18,000

Designer Zeev Aram, founder of Aram Store in Covent Garden, celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2014 with a series of art rugs commissioned from artists, designers, architects and writers.

Still available are striking works by pop artist Allen Jones and stained-glass artist Brian Clarke. Prices are upwards of £4,000.

Rug in hand knotted wool by Brian Clarke, £4525, available from Aram Store

But reissues of rugs by Eileen Gray (1878-1976) currently start at around £1,400.

London has many artists striking a happy balance between furnishing and art, whose chosen medium is usually rugs.

Crucially, they know what works well in a room and for the floor. Deirdre Dyson, with a sharply modern King’s Road showroom, launched a stunning new Feathers collection at the recent Maison & Objet trade fair in Paris.

Helen Yardley has a light-filled studio in Bermondsey crammed with yarns and samples, where she perfects her striking abstracts.

Meanwhile, supreme colourist Ptolemy Mann, working with Rug Maker of St Albans, turns her exquisite, graded-colour artworks into luminescent flat-weave rugs.

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