Cole & Son has unveiled Formations, a striking new wallpaper collection that looks back through more than a century of design history while creating something unmistakably contemporary.
The new Cole & Son Formations wallpaper collection explores one of the design house’s most enduring themes: geometry. Lines, grids, diamonds, trellises, stripes and repeated marks have been rediscovered within the extensive Cole & Son archive before being repainted, redrawn and reworked for modern interiors.
The result is a collection of luxury geometric wallpapers that feels both familiar and completely new.
Rather than relying on crisp digital perfection, Formations celebrates the character created by traditional craft. Etching, painting, printing and overprinting introduce visible layers, irregularities and texture, softening geometric forms and giving the wallpapers a wonderfully tactile quality.
It is geometry with a distinctly human touch.
More Than 150 Years of Cole & Son Design
Founded in London in 1875, Cole & Son has one of the most remarkable wallpaper archives in British design.
Today, the archive contains approximately 2,000 block-print designs, 500 screen-print patterns and an extensive collection of original drawings and historic wallpapers. Its history includes wallpapers created for some of Britain's most important interiors, including Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Kensington Palace and the Palace of Westminster.
For Formations, the Cole & Son design studio returned to this archive, examining original sketches, printer's proofs, pattern books and historic designs.
But this isn't simply a collection of reproduced archive wallpapers.
Cole & Son has taken the fundamental building blocks of geometric decoration and experimented with scale, colour, printing and texture. The brand describes the result as a contemporary interpretation of its geometric heritage, created through techniques including etching, printing and overprinting.
Across the collection you'll find everything from colourful statement wallpaper and large-scale geometric wallpaper to understated trellis patterns and sophisticated small-scale designs.
Here are some of our highlights.
Painted Prism: A Cole & Son Icon Reimagined
One of the most immediately recognisable designs in the Formations collection is Painted Prism.
The wallpaper reinterprets an iconic Cole & Son geometric print, replacing the precision of the original with hand-rendered brushwork.
Its kaleidoscopic diamonds overlap in a spectrum of colour, with the palette inspired by an archival Coles' paint card. Rather than appearing perfectly uniform, the individual forms have the character of painted marks, creating something that sits somewhere between a geometric wallpaper and a contemporary wall mural.
Painted Prism is an excellent choice for anyone looking for colourful wallpaper capable of completely transforming a room. We particularly love the idea of using it in entrance halls, cloakrooms and other spaces where you can afford to be adventurous with pattern.
Inlay: Small-Scale Geometry with a Luxurious Finish
At the quieter end of the collection is Inlay, a beautifully detailed geometric wallpaper inspired by decorative marquetry and an archival wood-block print.
Perfectly imperfect hexagonal forms repeat across the surface, while chalky inks, tonal variations and delicate metallic highlights create the impression that the pattern has been physically embedded into the wall.
There are five colourways, including Soft Multi & Gold on Cream, Jewel Multi & Bronze on Charcoal, Jewel Multi & Copper on Racing Green, Turquoise & Gilver on Navy and Shell & Gold on Vanilla.
For anyone searching for sophisticated geometric wallpaper that doesn't dominate a room, Inlay is one of the most versatile designs in the collection.
Diamond Maze: Architectural Geometry Made Softer
Diamond Maze takes a graphic print from the Cole & Son archive and dramatically increases its scale.
Interlocking geometric forms create an almost quilted effect across the wall, while subtle variations in tone prevent the pattern from feeling overly rigid.
Produced using gravure printing, successive layers of colour create depth and movement within the design. Cole & Son describes the result as architectural yet inviting, which captures the balance particularly well.
Diamond Maze is available in Sage, Stone, Naples Yellow and Petrol.
The wallpaper comes on a 10m roll at 69cm wide, with a 68.5cm repeat and straight match.
For contemporary bedrooms, living rooms and sophisticated modern interiors, this is one of our favourite new Cole & Son wallpapers.
Wavelet: Movement, Colour and the Art of Bargello
Wavelet brings a completely different character to Formations.
Undulating bands of colour travel across the wallpaper in a pattern inspired by Bargello embroidery, the historic needlework technique known for its distinctive flame-like geometric forms.
Cole & Son has built the design using overlapping layers of ink. Slight variations between those layers intentionally reveal the hand of the maker, while the flowing colour also references traditional Florentine marbled papers.
It creates a geometric wallpaper that feels unusually fluid.
The richly coloured Sierra, Olive & Marigold combination makes a particularly strong statement, while softer combinations give the same pattern an entirely different personality.
Scattered Ink: Geometry Meets Freehand Painting
Scattered Ink explores the contrast between precision and imperfection.
A sharply etched structure is combined with freely painted ink marks, allowing an exact geometric layer and a much looser artistic layer to exist together.
The result is an understated all-over wallpaper with plenty of texture and movement without becoming visually overwhelming.
Available in Ochre, Olive and Denim, Scattered Ink is particularly easy to imagine throughout larger spaces where a more dramatic geometric wallpaper might become too dominant.
Fretwork: A Century-Old Cole & Son Design Returns
Formations isn't only about creating new patterns from archival inspiration.
Fretwork has a direct connection with Cole & Son's past.
Its predecessor, Frette, has been preserved in the Cole & Son archive for more than a century. The intertwined trellis has now been reworked with greater tonal variation and a new colour palette.
Traditional analogue printing allows layers of ink to create texture across the wallpaper, while the repeating geometry produces a subtle honeycomb effect when viewed across a complete wall.
Colourways include Leaf Green & Sage, Teal & Viridian, Marigold & Ochre, Stone & Chalk and Charcoal & Spice.
For traditional interiors that need a more contemporary edge, or contemporary rooms that need a little heritage, Fretwork bridges the two beautifully.
Coles' Colour Card: From the Archive to the Wall
One of the most unusual wallpapers in Formations wasn't originally a wallpaper at all.
Coles' Colour Card is based on a mid-century paint card discovered within the Cole & Son archive.
The original document featured an optimistic collection of colours including Tuscan Red, Lapis and Mimosa, accompanied by painterly daubs and splatters. Cole & Son has transformed that practical studio reference into a wonderfully playful wallpaper.
For maximalist interiors, creative spaces or simply anyone who loves colour, this could become one of the collection's most memorable designs.
Fresco Trellis: Classic Pattern with a Textured Finish
Trellis wallpaper is one of interior design's most enduring patterns, but Fresco Trellis gives it a distinctly different finish.
The ordered geometric structure sits over layers of stippled colour designed to resemble pigment worked into an aged plaster or fresco surface.
That texture makes the geometry feel softer and more organic.
The colour combinations are equally interesting, ranging from Hyacinth on Ochre and Coral on Tea Rose to Olive on Duck Egg and the quieter Parchment on Stone.
It is an excellent example of what Formations does particularly well: taking a recognisable historic decorative idea and making it relevant to contemporary interiors.
Angled Planes: Large-Scale Statement Wallpaper
For something altogether bolder, meet Angled Planes.
Huge harlequin diamonds extend across the wall in sophisticated mineral-inspired palettes. The design is rotary screen printed, maintaining the crisp definition of the pattern while allowing its dramatic scale to do the talking.
Available in Bronze, Plaster and Verdigris, Angled Planes demonstrates just how effective large-scale geometric wallpaper can be.
The Bronze colourway in particular creates an extraordinary backdrop to a living room, especially when combined with sculptural furniture, artwork and richly textured upholstery.
Tesserae: Inspired by Decorative Mosaics
Tesserae takes its name from the small tiles traditionally used to create mosaics.
Here, imperfect squares form a layered geometric surface. Their slight irregularities prevent the design from feeling mechanically uniform, while a tiny archival spot pattern overlays the geometry to introduce another level of detail.
The result gives the impression of a finely assembled mosaic rather than conventional printed wallpaper.
Midnight creates a wonderfully deep blue wall, while Gold & Pewter introduces metallic warmth and Pearl offers a much lighter interpretation.
Archival Marble: Historic Decorative Painting Reimagined
Perhaps the most unexpected design in Formations is Archival Marble.
The wallpaper draws upon Cole & Son's historic Marbles and Scrumbles designs and the decorative painting techniques popular during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
These specialist finishes were traditionally used to imitate marble, stone and other natural materials. For Formations, Cole & Son has brought swirling veins, layered pigments and mineral textures together within broad horizontal bands.
Importantly, Archival Marble is intended to be hung horizontally.
That orientation accentuates the proportions of the room while allowing the broad stripes of faux marble to wrap around the interior. The result is somewhere between striped wallpaper, marble wallpaper and a large-scale decorative mural.
Available in Archival Marble, Emerald and Sand, it's one of the collection's real showstoppers.
Why We Love the Cole & Son Formations Collection
What makes Formations interesting isn't simply that geometric wallpaper is back in focus.
It is the way Cole & Son has approached geometry.
Perfect digital lines have been replaced with brushstrokes, layered inks, etched marks, irregular forms and visible evidence of traditional printing techniques. Pattern feels less manufactured and more crafted.
This approach is also what connects Formations so naturally to the wider history of Cole & Son. The company has been creating wallcoverings in London since 1875, and the new collection doesn't hide that heritage. Instead, it uses the archive as raw material for something new.
The official Cole & Son launch describes Formations as a return to the geometric language found throughout its archive, including sketches, swatches and printers' proofs accumulated over more than a century.
For us, that balance between archive and contemporary design is exactly what makes the collection successful.
There are wallpapers capable of becoming the focal point of an entire room, such as Painted Prism and Archival Marble, alongside much quieter patterns such as Inlay and Scattered Ink that can comfortably cover all four walls.
It's a collection designed not just to be looked at, but to be lived with.
Shop Cole & Son Formations Wallpaper at Courthouse Interiors
Discover the new Cole & Son Formations wallpaper collection at Courthouse Interiors, including Painted Prism, Inlay, Diamond Maze, Wavelet, Scattered Ink, Fretwork, Coles' Colour Card, Fresco Trellis, Angled Planes, Tesserae and Archival Marble.
Whether you're searching for luxury wallpaper for a living room, contemporary geometric wallpaper for a bedroom, colourful statement wallpaper for a hallway or a sophisticated designer wallpaper for a complete interior scheme, Formations offers a fresh interpretation of one of decoration's most enduring themes.
Explore Cole & Son Formations and discover more from one of Britain's most celebrated wallpaper design houses.
