Chinoiserie Mural in Mayfair Residence
ChinoiserieKensington Gilders were commissioned to create this large-scale chinoiserie mural for the hallway of a private residence in Mayfair, London. The room is a formal reception hall with panelled wainscoting, coffered ceiling and dark hardwood floors, and the brief was to fill the upper wall panels with a continuous chinoiserie landscape that would wrap the entire room.
The walls were first gilded with silver leaf, applied in overlapping sheets over a carefully prepared surface. The silver was then sealed with a protective lacquer to prevent tarnishing and to provide a stable ground for the painted decoration. The sealed silver has a soft, warm lustre under the recessed downlights, giving the room an ambient glow that changes subtly throughout the day.
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The painted design is a continuous landscape scene in the classic chinoiserie tradition: gnarled and flowering trees grow from a ground line of rocks, grasses and garden ornaments, their branches spreading upward and across the panels. Birds perch among the branches, butterflies drift between flowers, and the foliage ranges from tight botanical detail to looser, more atmospheric passages. The colour palette is deliberately restrained, using tones of cream, soft gold, sage and pale blue against the silver ground. This tonal approach gives the mural a quiet elegance that suits the formality of the room without competing with it.
The scale of the commission was significant. The mural runs the full length of the hallway on both walls, turning the corner and continuing into the adjacent alcove. Maintaining consistency of style, tone and proportion across such a large area required careful planning. Our artist worked from detailed scale drawings before any paint was applied, mapping out the composition so that the trees and branches flowed naturally from panel to panel and around the architectural features of the room.
The finished hallway has the quality of a room in a great English country house, where chinoiserie wallpaper and hand-painted decoration have been used for centuries to bring warmth and character to formal spaces.
