Bringing the Outside In: Nature Inspired Wallpaper and Wallcoverings

Ask ten designers what “biophilic” means for their current project and you’ll get ten different answers — a client who wants more daylight, a brief built around natural materials, a room that simply needs to feel less urban. The wallcoverings are rarely the first thing mentioned, but they’re almost always the thing that decides whether the room actually delivers on the brief. To put it simply, biophilic design is the practice of incorporating natural elements (materials, patterns, and forms drawn from the natural world) into a space to support wellbeing and a sense of connection to nature.

The impulse itself predates the term. The great chinoiserie tradition, the toile de Jouy, the panoramic scenic: each one, in its own century, was already doing the work that biophilic design now has a name for. Botanical wallpaper is the modern continuation of that instinct, and one of the most direct ways a specifier can put it into practice.

For projects built around this philosophy, botanical wallcoverings are one of the most powerful tools available. A well-chosen design does not merely reference nature — it creates an environment.

The research on biophilic design is consistent: exposure to natural forms, patterns, and materials reduces stress, supports focus, and increases a sense of wellbeing. The translation of that finding into interior specification is less straightforward. Not every plant motif achieves this. What matters is depth of reference — whether the design carries the complexity and particularity of the natural world, or simply borrows its surface.

This is why hand painted wallpaper holds a particular place in the nature inspired category: the artist’s hand brings the same particularity to a surface that nature brings to a landscape.

Botanical wallpaper can hold an entire world, or just a small graft of nature carried indoors. At one end sits the garden: a specific, contained patch of the natural world, whether trained into formal order or left with something wilder about it. At the other sits the open landscape: panoramic, immersive, dissolving the edges of a room until it's no longer clear where the wall ends and the view begins.

Florent is a printed chinoiserie that works within the walled garden tradition. Espalier trees heavy with fruit and blossom create an elegant architectural frame; birds perch among flowering branches; the composition pays homage to European garden design through the vocabulary of traditional Chinese art. The character of the room it creates will vary with the colourway: warm tones (rusts, ambers, ochres) bring a richness and enclosure that reads like autumn light; cooler grounds open the design out, giving it a freshness. Either way, being in the room feels like stepping into your own secret garden.

Shimla takes a different geography. An interpretation of 19th-century French scenic papers, it offers an idealistic view of India’s tropical landscapes: lush, spacious, executed in a block-print style that gives it both formality and freedom. It comes in two colourways rich with warmth and colour, and a third rendered entirely in monochrome, so there’s a version for whatever the room needs.

Some of our most considered nature inspired designs incorporate embroidery alongside hand-painted grounds, creating a richness that's felt as much as seen. Silk thread adds a dimensionality to a botanical composition that changes the quality of the surface.

Fluid Meadow, a collaboration with Harris Reed, captures the elegance of birch trees through a series of silhouetted forms. Freehand stitches trace each branch, mirroring the organic texture and movement of a forest rather than reproducing it exactly. Burnt Birch grounds the design in warm tones; while Gilded Boughs lets it shine.

Wilde Dreams weaves wildlife into the botanicals, with swallows and bees swooping across silk in a composition that refuses to settle. The design is named after Oscar Wilde and carries something of his philosophy: beauty as essential, surface as substance. We explored the full story of the design in our Harris Reed collaboration piece, but as a botanical wallcovering it stands on its own terms: a garden in motion, rendered in thread on silk.

Some designs blur painting and embroidery into a single gesture. Oak Leaf, a collaboration with Sophie Paterson, combines hand-painted branches with hand-embroidered leaves and acorns. It’s available as a full wallcovering or as a framed artwork, for a scheme that wants the same botanical language at a smaller scale.

Not all nature inspired wallcoverings begin with a plant. Some of the most interesting start further back: with the texture of stone, the erosion of rock, the trace a mineral makes as it moves through water. These are designs that translate the patterns of the natural world rather than its flora, and they bring a different quality to an interior.

Travertine began as an accident. Co-founder and Design Director Lizzie Deshayes was experimenting with metallic paints when she wiped her brush on a linen cloth, and the streaks left behind resembled the intricate veining of natural stone. That gesture became a design: iridescent metallic paint on silk, the surface shifting with the light in the way that polished travertine does. It captures the raw elegance of nature’s mineral world through a process that is itself as unplanned as geology.

Rockface takes a different approach to the same territory. The rugged mountainscapes of California are rendered through a technique unlike anything else in our collections: overlaid sheets of hand-dyed and lacquered paper, torn rather than cut, finished with hand-painted details. The rawness of the subject matter and the rawness of the technique speak to each other; the result is simultaneously an elegant backdrop and a bold statement, the natural world translated into surface through an act of making that is itself deeply physical.

Both designs take their subjects from the non-living natural world, and both achieve something more conventional botanical wallcoverings do not: a sense of geological time, of surfaces shaped by forces larger than any garden.

What connects Florent’s walled garden, Shimla’s open landscape, Oak Leaf’s single branch, and Travertine’s mineral surface is not one idea of what nature should look like on a wall, but a set of registers a specifier can choose between. The decision has less to do with a room’s function than with the character it’s after: enclosed or expansive, narrative or abstract, a whole scene or a single specimen.

Nature inspired wallpaper also tends to outlast the design cycles that move faster around it. A trend-led botanical print dates quickly; a hand-painted botanical mural, worked from an original artwork rather than a repeating file, does not carry the same expiry date. For a client weighing up a design for a room they plan to live with for decades, that distinction is worth raising early in the specification conversation.

The range of what nature can mean in a wallcovering is wider than any single collection can contain. Whether as bespoke wallpaper made for a unique space or a design ready to specify off the shelf, our botanical and landscape luxury wallcoverings span hand painted silk, block-printed panoramics, embroidered wildflower compositions, and surfaces that translate the mineral world rather than the floral one.

Explore the botanical collection at fromental.com, discover nature inspired bespoke wallcoverings, or make an enquiry directly with our team for projects at specification stage.

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