Two Centuries of the Same Trick: Inside Fromental’s Objects Collection

Fromental’s first venture beyond the wall is not, on inspection, a new trick. It is the studio’s two-decade habit of running one craft tradition through another, taken off wallpaper and put onto cushions, wall hangings and framed silk paintings you can actually hold. The bird artworks make the argument most literally, repainted in Fromental’s Wuxi studio using the same East-meets-West technique an eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary invented for the Chinese imperial court. Everything else in the collection, from a Las Vegas hotel designer’s needlepoint pillows to co-founder Lizzie Deshayes’s own return to a craft she first picked up as a child, is the same instinct working at a smaller scale.

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Introduction

Fromental, the London wallcoverings studio founded by Tim Butcher and Lizzie Deshayes in 2005, now sells more than wallpaper. Its Objects collection, built around hand-embroidered needlepoint cushions, wall hangings and framed silk paintings, has been running since 2023, expanding steadily rather than arriving as a single debut. The clearest sign of that expansion is a set of four needlepoint pillow designs created with Roger Thomas, the AD100 designer who spent four decades shaping Wynn Resorts’ interiors, and a recurring series of hand-painted bird artworks that the studio describes as a direct homage to Giuseppe Castiglione, the Jesuit missionary who became one of the most unusual painters ever to work inside the Chinese imperial court.

Those two threads, a named interior designer’s take on needlepoint and a 300-year-old art-historical reference rendered in silk, sound like two separate product lines. They are not. Both are the same working method Fromental has used on wallpaper since 2005, applied to freestanding objects for the first time: take an image from one tradition and have it repainted, or re-stitched, through the hand and technique of a completely different one. The Objects collection is not a diversification exercise bolted onto a wallpaper business. It is the studio’s central trick, taken off the wall.

What the Objects collection actually contains, three years in

By the time most coverage of the Objects collection appeared, it was no longer new. Fromental had already announced its collaboration with Roger Thomas on 3 April 2023, four needlepoint pillow designs named Belgrave, Hampstead, Bloomsbury and Soho. Belgrave takes its swan-neck moulding and checkerboard motifs from London architectural detail. Hampstead and Bloomsbury both draw on Georgian silhouettes, the first set against a tweed-inspired ground, the second built from moulding profiles Thomas sketched while travelling the city. Soho is the outlier, a spiralling, cubist-inflected pattern pulled from the same sketchbook. Thomas has described his approach to the collaboration in blunt terms: the more interaction there is between hand and object, he has said, the more soul the finished piece acquires, which is as much a statement about needlepoint as a craft as it is about this particular commission.

Each pillow is worked on stretcher-mounted linen canvas in a basketweave stitch, chosen specifically because it produces a woven, tapestry-like finish rather than the flatter surface a tent stitch would give. That detail matters more than it might read at first. A basketweave stitch is slower and more structurally demanding than the alternatives, and it is the choice that makes a Fromental cushion read as a small tapestry rather than a large embroidered patch. The collection has grown since, with wall hangings and further cushion designs joining the original four pillows, but the Roger Thomas commission remains the clearest single example of how the studio briefs an outside designer into its own craft process rather than simply licensing a pattern.

The collector who started stitching during lockdown, and the one who never stopped

Fromental’s own account of the Objects collection traces its origin to Lizzie Deshayes taking up needlepoint again during the pandemic, and to a specific catalyst: watching needlepoint furniture attributed to Pierre Chareau and Jean Lurçat sell for serious money at Christie’s, which convinced her the craft deserved to be treated as more than a domestic pastime. Chareau’s furniture has since gone on to set real auction records. His MB 624 desk sold for close to a million dollars at Christie’s Paris sale of Maison de Verre furnishings, the largest single grouping of his work ever offered, and the sale as a whole made more than three times its estimate. Lurçat, a tapestry designer whose work the Maison de Verre’s original owners collected directly, sits naturally alongside that story as a reference point for textile art commanding serious prices.

What that origin story leaves out, and what is worth adding here, is that Deshayes’s relationship with needlepoint did not begin in 2020. She made her first piece around the age of eight, then set the craft aside for decades while building a career in textile and surface design, before returning to it in earnest roughly fifteen years before she discussed her practice publicly, drawing on a fascination with fourteenth-century and mid-century woven tapestries and a small library of out-of-print technical books. The pandemic did not create her interest in needlepoint. It appears to have been the moment that interest, already long-established as a private practice, turned into a commercial collection. That is a more accurate way to describe what happened, and a more interesting one: this is not a founder discovering a hobby in isolation, but a designer with fifteen years of serious, self-taught needlework finally building a business around a skill she had already spent a decade and a half refining quietly, alongside running a wallpaper studio.

An eighteenth-century Jesuit, reversed

The Objects collection’s bird artworks are where Fromental’s cross-cultural method shows up most literally, and where the studio has been most explicit about its reference. Each set of three framed pieces, hand-painted onto a taro silk ground and mounted in gilded bamboo frames, is described by Fromental as a direct homage to Giuseppe Castiglione, an Italian Jesuit missionary who arrived at the Qing imperial court in the early eighteenth century and spent the rest of his life there under the Chinese name Lang Shining. Castiglione is one of the genuinely strange figures in art history: a European-trained painter who worked for three successive emperors, developing a hybrid style that folded Western linear perspective and volumetric shading into Chinese painting conventions and materials, at a court that had never seen anything quite like it before.

Fromental’s bird series inverts that exact trick rather than simply repeating it. Castiglione was a European painter adapting his own technique to Chinese court expectations, materials and subject matter. The Objects collection reverses the direction entirely: the studio’s Wuxi-based artists take a set of roughly 400 French ornithological prints from the 1950s, cataloguing European species such as the chaffinch, the ortolan and the wood warbler, and repaint them using traditional Chinese painting technique onto silk. It is the same cultural translation Castiglione performed nearly 300 years ago, run in the opposite direction: European subject matter this time, filtered through Chinese hand and method, rather than a European hand adapting to a Chinese court. That reversal is not incidental. It is the clearest possible demonstration that Fromental’s founding idea, a Western design brief executed through an entirely different craft tradition, was never limited to wallpaper. The birds simply make the mechanism visible in a single, self-contained object, at a price point considerably lower than a full wallcovering scheme.

Three studios, not one

One detail in how the Objects collection is usually described is worth correcting directly, because it affects how a reader should picture the collection being made. Fromental’s needlepoint pieces, including the Roger Thomas pillows, are hand-embroidered in the studio’s Calcutta atelier. The hand-painted silk bird artworks are a separate craft entirely, produced by painters in Fromental’s Wuxi studio in China, the same studio responsible for the brand’s hand-painted and hand-embroidered wallcoverings. Treating “Calcutta” as a single answer for where the whole Objects collection is made, as some coverage has, collapses two different craft traditions, worked by two different groups of artists on two different continents, into one location. The distinction is not a technicality. It is the reason a needlepoint cushion and a silk bird painting from the same collection can look, and be made, so differently, despite carrying the same brand name and sitting in the same online shop.

London remains the studio’s design and prototyping base, where Deshayes and her team develop patterns, sample colourways and build the full-scale cartoons that get sent out to Wuxi or Calcutta for execution. Butcher and Deshayes have both described travelling to the China studio personally to work alongside artists there when developing a new technique, rather than briefing remotely and waiting for results, which is consistent with a studio whose reputation rests on craft outcomes it can vouch for in person.

Twenty years on, and off the wall for the first time

2025 marks Fromental’s twentieth anniversary, and the studio has used the milestone to frame a wider expansion of what it makes, including its first fully digitally printed Chinoiserie wallcoverings under the Papier Chinois name, launched that September with lead times cut from twelve weeks to four. Read against that backdrop, the Objects collection looks less like an isolated side project and more like one strand of a deliberate move, twenty years into the business, to apply the studio’s core method beyond a single product category. Butcher and Deshayes have described their founding ambition as treating walls as canvases for original decorative art, and as moving decorative art from the edges of a room toward its centre. A cushion, a wall hanging or a framed silk painting is a more literal version of that same ambition than a further wallpaper pattern would be. It puts the studio’s craft directly into a room’s centre, on a chair or a side table, rather than around its edges.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

It would be easy to read the Objects collection as a wallpaper studio testing a new revenue line, a reasonable enough move for any twenty-year-old design business. What is actually happening is more specific than that. Fromental’s entire reputation was built on taking an image and having it remade through an unfamiliar hand and technique, European pattern through Chinese embroidery, historical reference through contemporary craft. The Objects collection does not introduce that idea. It simply removes the wall.

The bird paintings are the clearest proof, because they run the studio’s own founding trick in reverse and credit the artist who invented the original version nearly three centuries ago. The needlepoint cushions make the same case in a different register, built by a co-founder who spent fifteen years quietly mastering a craft before deciding it belonged in a shop rather than only in her own house. Neither the objects nor the argument are new. They are simply, for the first time, small enough to hold.