Zoffany

Zoffany began with a building rather than a drawing board. During the restoration of Temple Newsam, a Jacobean estate built in the sixteenth century, restorers uncovered fragments of wallcoverings and woven silks. Humphrey Boyle documented and restored them, and that archive became the brand's first wallpaper collection. Temple Newsam dates from 1520 and was built for Thomas Lord Darcy, one of Henry VIII's most significant courtiers; several long-running Zoffany designs come from the house, among them Chintz, Pomegranate Velvet and Storks and Thrushes.

The design studio is now at Voysey House in London, an Arts and Crafts building. Zoffany came into its present group in 1987, when Walker Greenbank bought Wallcoverings International, and is one of the brands of Sanderson Design Group. The group prints its wallpaper at Anstey in Loughborough and its fabric at Standfast and Barracks in Lancaster, a factory established in 1924.

Zoffany is the most formal of the Sanderson group books and the one that suits a period room best. Damasks and cut velvets on a properly rebuilt frame are the clearest demonstration we can give of what traditional upholstery is for.