A plain guide to Joules wallpaper

Most people meet Joules through a raincoat or a striped jumper. The wallpaper is a quieter business, and a more interesting one. It carries the same country vocabulary, pheasants and hares and garden birds and hand-drawn florals, but it behaves like proper decorating paper rather than a fashion spin-off. If you have been circling it and want to know what you are actually buying, this is the plain version.

What you are actually buying

The specifications are consistent across the range, which makes planning easy. Rolls are 0.52m wide by 10m long, the standard British size, and they sit at £52 a roll. Most designs are paste-the-wall, so the paste goes onto the wall and the dry length goes straight on top. A good number are spongeable, which matters more than people expect in a hallway or a boot room. Finishes are usually matt, so the pattern reads flat and calm rather than shiny.

There are exceptions worth knowing about. Trailing Indienne Floral, for one, is paste-the-paper rather than paste-the-wall. That single difference changes how you set up your table and how long you have to work before the paper starts to expand. Read the label on the roll rather than assuming a whole range behaves as one thing.

What the range is good at

• Animals, drawn with restraint. Pheasant, Guinea Fowl, Hunting Birds, Fox and Hare, Harbour Dogs. These are illustrated rather than photographed, and the colourways keep them the right side of novelty: Linen Green, French Navy, Blush Pink, Crème.

• Florals with a cottage accent. Honey Floral, Robey Cottage Floral, Gilmorton Ditsy Garden, Stately Floral. Tight repeats for small rooms, longer trails for a wall you actually want to look at.

• Stripes and checks that earn their keep. Harborough Stripe, Heritage Stripe, Rothero Check in Heritage. Quiet enough to live with, and a stripe usually means less waste at the cutting table.

The repeat is the number to look at

Pattern repeat is the vertical distance the design travels before it starts again, and it quietly decides how much paper you throw away. Joules spans a wide spread. Honey Floral repeats every 32.52cm. Juliette Floral is 34.67cm. At the far end, Scot Floral and Tree of Life Floral both repeat at 190cm, which is not far off the height of a door.

A 190cm repeat is not a reason to walk away. It is a reason to buy an extra roll. On a standard 2.4m wall, a long offset repeat can cost you the better part of a metre on every drop once you have matched it. Small repeats forgive mistakes. Long ones reward planning.

The kindest patterns of all are the free-match ones. Harborough Stripe and Country Critters Chunky Stripe both match freely, which means no lining up sideways at the seam. If this is a first attempt at papering, start there. Our guide to how much wallpaper you need walks through the arithmetic.

Paint from the same shelf

Joules makes paint as well, and the names rhyme with the papers. Beckett's Gold paint sits alongside Beckett Star paper in Antique Gold. Fields Edge paint alongside Fields Edge Floral. Canal Mallard, Cotswold Stone, Faded Woad, Grandma's Quilt: the colour names are drawn from the same country dictionary as the patterns.

We would not claim the paint is laboratory-matched to the paper, because nobody has told us it is. What we would say is that when you are choosing a woodwork or ceiling colour to sit beside a papered wall, starting inside the same range narrows the field usefully. Hold them together in daylight, not under a bulb, before you commit.

Where it works, and where it does not

Boot rooms, cloakrooms, box rooms, back halls. Joules suits the small, hard-working rooms most schemes ignore. A pheasant paper in a downstairs loo is a decision that makes people smile, and at 0.52m x 10m it usually costs one roll.

It works upstairs too. Swanton Floral Midnight in navy on a chimney breast is calmer than the name suggests. And there is a Plain Wallpaper in the range, which gives the eye somewhere to rest when a pattern is already doing enough on one wall.

Where it works less well is the large formal reception room with high ceilings and deep cornice. The drawing style is warm and slightly rustic. It wants a beam or a low sill nearby. If that is your room, the bigger architectural patterns will hold the space better.

Hanging it

Paste-the-wall is the friendlier of the two methods, and it is what most of this range uses. Paste one drop's width of wall at a time, hang the dry length, brush out from the centre, then trim at the skirting with a fresh blade run against a broad knife. Wipe stray paste off the face immediately, especially on a matt paper, where it dries to a sheen you will see every time the light moves. Our paste the wall versus paste the paper guide covers the difference properly.

One last thing. Buy every roll you need in one go and check the batch number on each label. Joules paper is printed in batches like any other, and two batches of the same design can sit fractionally apart in tone. On a pheasant you might get away with it. On a plain, you will not.

Seeing it properly

The full Joules range is on the shop pages, with room-set photography and the pattern repeat printed on every product, so you can check the number before you order rather than after. The florals and the stripes are the two easiest places to start. If you would rather see everything side by side, the whole wallpaper range is there as well.