Lincrusta: more than a wall covering

While interior walls are typically the place we find Lincrusta’s historical embossed coverings, increasingly it is being used to bring textural pattern to other surfaces, too. In the spirit of free-thinking that Lincrusta’s founder Frederick Walton brought to the invention of the linseed oil-based panels, interior professionals are finding new places to employ it as a textural accent.

The resurgence of tactility in our interiors is bringing back texture not only to our vertical walls but to the architectural fifth wall – or ceiling – too. Where once it might have been chosen to help disguise structural defects, it is now being seen as a lesser-exploited resource for creative expression. It’s an opportunity that wasn’t missed by William Morris, or more recently, by contemporary promoters of pattern House of Hackney.

Where four or five walls of texture might be deemed overwhelming, Lincrusta is being used as a furnishing finish to bring flashes of pattern that are then layered throughout a room with other textures. At the Crowne Plaza in Edinburgh, for example, the bar’s vertical surfaces are enveloped in Lincrusta’s Art Nouveau design – painted a deeply pigmented green and overlaid with a metallic effect – and teamed with an elegant wooden top and brass foot rail. A headboard covered in Elizabeth brings warmth to a bedroom in a private residential project in London and even a cooker hood might be the surface of choice – this was the case in a Chicago residential interior by Hawthorn Development where Lincrusta’s Italian Renaissance design was applied and the surface treated to suggest aged metal.

While once it might have been seen as an in-place-of product, Lincrusta is now firmly seen as a unique material in its own right, flexibly bringing texture and pattern to all manner of interior surfaces.

© Architonic