14 Aug The Story Behind Margaret: The Visitor’s Book Collection
Every wallpaper collection I create begins with a story of some kind. Sometimes it’s a place, a flower I’ve noticed on a walk, or a small detail that has found its way into my sketchbook.
But Margaret: The Visitor’s Book Collection began somewhere rather different: with an old family visitors’ book, started by my great-great-grandmother more than a century ago.
Margaret’s Visitors Book
I discovered the book amongst a collection of old family folders, tucked in alongside letters, photographs and other memorabilia that had been kept and passed down over the years.
My great-great-grandmother, Margaret MacKail, began the visitors’ book in 1906.
Margaret was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones and grew up surrounded by an extraordinary creative circle. Art, drawing, pattern and making were very much part of everyday family life.
The book itself is one of those wonderful objects that becomes more interesting the longer you spend with it.
Its pages contain photographs of guests, signatures and some wonderful, endearing drawings by Margaret. Some are more careful and considered; others are simply little sketches and doodles – marks made almost absent-mindedly on a page.
And it was those quieter details that I found myself returning to.
There is something incredibly special about seeing someone’s handwriting or a little drawing made more than a hundred years ago. They weren’t necessarily created to be displayed or even preserved. They were simply part of everyday life – a little creative spurt in a particular moment that Margaret probably wouldn’t have thought much more about.
Yet here they still are.
Finding inspiration in the everyday
When I began looking at the book with the idea of creating a collection, I didn’t want to reproduce something that felt overtly historical.
Instead, I became interested in the shapes, lines and rhythms hidden within its pages – and in how Margaret’s little drawings might become the starting point for something new.
Different pages began to suggest different patterns.
The Long View was inspired by a wonderful series of tiny doodles running down the right-hand side of one page. Among them are trees, a house, a river and a horse-drawn carriage – almost like little glimpses of a landscape or fragments of a journey. I loved the sense of a story unfolding through these tiny scenes and began exploring how I could translate that into a repeating pattern.
Watching, Waiting (shown below) came from another particularly endearing drawing: a cat sitting beneath a group of birds. It is such a small, characterful moment, and exactly the sort of detail within the book that I found myself drawn to.
Then there were the beautiful trailing floral doodles on the very first page, with their long, curling lines. These became the starting point for Between the Lines, where I wanted to retain something of the looseness and movement of Margaret’s original marks.
Rather than copying the pages literally, I used these details as starting points – drawing, rearranging and developing them until they began to work as patterns in their own right.
Gradually, the collection began to take shape.
That process – taking a tiny sketch and watching it become a repeat pattern – is still one of my favourite parts of designing wallpaper. There is a point where individual marks stop feeling like separate drawings and begin to create a rhythm of their own.
With this collection, though, there was an added layer: the starting point had already existed for more than a century.
Bringing Margaret’s own drawings into the collection
One design in particular feels especially close to the original visitors’ book.
Margaret By Hand incorporates Margaret’s actual drawings into the decorative detail of the stripe.
I wanted to preserve something of her hand within the collection rather than simply redraw everything in my own.
There is something I find quite moving about that – a family connection that spans time.
These small drawings, made casually in a book in the early 1900s, have travelled through generations of our family and now form part of a wallpaper designed for homes today.
They were never created with that purpose in mind – which is perhaps what makes them so special.
Margaret: The Visitors Book – The Long View – Willow
Margaret: The Visitors Book – Watching, Waiting – Mist
Margaret: The Visitors Book – Found Flower – Rose Pink
Margaret: The Visitors Book – Quiet Bloom – Willow
Designing for homes now
Although the inspiration for the collection is historical, I never wanted the finished wallpapers to feel like reproductions of Edwardian designs.
Willow & Woods has always been about creating wallpaper that feels at home in real, lived-in interiors – timeless rooms that gather objects, memories and layers over time.
So I wanted to take the character and rhythm I found within the visitors’ book and translate it into patterns that could sit comfortably in contemporary homes.
Some of the designs are delicate and quietly repeating; others have a little more structure. Throughout the collection there are references back to the drawings, shapes and marks I discovered within the original pages.
For me, that is what makes the collection feel connected to the past without being confined by it.
Willow, Rose and Mist
Colour was an important part of getting that balance right.
The collection is available in three softly layered colourways: Willow, a softened natural green; Rose, a muted powdery pink; and Mist, a chalky, greyed blue.
I wanted the colours to have enough presence to give a room character, but to be gentle enough to live with over time. I didn’t want them to feel trend-led, or like colours that would quickly date.
Wallpaper becomes part of the backdrop to so many ordinary moments in a home, and I always think about that when choosing colour. It needs to work not only when a room is newly decorated, but years later when furniture has moved, pictures have been added and life has accumulated around it.
Choosing wallpaper should feel considered and confident.
The things we leave behind
Perhaps that is also why this particular collection feels so personal to me.
The visitors’ book has made me think a lot about the things that survive within families.
They aren’t always the things that were created to be important.
Sometimes they are photographs, handwritten notes, a signature, or a tiny drawing made in the corner of a page. Sometimes they’re things that have simply been kept, moved from house to house and passed from one generation to the next.
Over time, these very ordinary things can become extraordinarily meaningful. Not only because they have survived, but because they have been loved and kept.
And I think homes work in much the same way.
The rooms we live in become the backdrop to everyday life. They collect our belongings, our memories and our stories, often without us really noticing it happening.
That is something I have always wanted Willow & Woods wallpapers to be part of – not the loudest thing in a room, but something that brings warmth, pattern and character to the background of people’s lives.
More than a hundred years after Margaret began filling the pages of her visitors’ book, it feels very special to be able to take some of those marks and allow them to become part of another home’s story.
Margaret: The Visitor’s Book Collection is hand-drawn and designed by Willow & Woods in Britain and printed to order in the UK on FSC-certified paper using eco-friendly inks.
No Comments