Each year, Graham & Brown announces its Wallpaper of the Year and Color of the Year. The wallpaper and paint company’s in-house studio identifies key design shifts in the interiors industry and forecasts future trends that will shape its collections for the coming months.
For 2020, the studio has combined an archival design and contemporary color palette to create the Graham & Brown Wallpaper of the Year: Bloomsbury Neo-Mint and Color of the Year: Adeline.
The two selections highlight a key interiors theme that Graham & Brown color and trend specialist Paula Taylor found during her 2020 trends research: a growing desire to dive into historical archives and use the aesthetics of the past to inform the designs of the future.
Learn more about how the Wallpaper and Color of the Year 2020 reimagine an archived design for today’s interiors below.
Wallpaper of the Year 2020: Bloomsbury Neo-Mint
The Graham & Brown Wallpaper of the Year 2020: Bloomsbury Neo-Mint celebrates the influential creative output of the Bloomsbury Set, a group of intellectuals, philosophers, artists and friends that formed in 1907.
The Bloomsbury Set’s unconventional Victorian Boho style was a radical break from traditional Victorian and Edwardian décor at the time and became heavily influential in following decades.
Graham & Brown continues this approach through Bloomsbury Neo-Mint, a wallpaper adorned with an array of flowers, insects and foliage that can work for the most contemporary of spaces.
The vertical totem trail pattern references 18th-century neoclassical interiors, combined with English countryside motifs of chrysanthemum, primula and rose.
The wallpaper’s backdrop is a soft, pastel shade of green that sits alongside other muted gelato hues that have become increasingly prevalent across interiors.
Along with Neo-Mint, the Bloomsbury wallpaper is available in:
- Clancy Gray – a lighter, airier blend of warm florals on a crisp white background
- Emerald – a colorful fusion of yellow, purple and red flowers on a rich emerald green backdrop
- Noir – an inky take on the boho look that features a dark, sophisticated setting beneath block-color florals
Each wallpaper design in the Graham & Brown collection is mirrored by a precisely matched hero paint color and three additional coordinating hues for a complete, full-room solution.
Color of the Year 2020: Adeline
To complement Bloomsbury Neo-Mint, Graham & Brown selected Adeline as its Color of the Year 2020.
The title for the rich bottle green shade comes from the first name of Adeline Virginia Woolf, the pioneering author and founding member of the Bloomsbury Set.
The color pinpoints and amplifies the deepest leaf green found in the Bloomsbury wallpaper, conveying the country gardens and whimsical interiors the Bloomsbury Group favored.
It’s an oxygenating, fresh tone that aims to balance the increasing amount of technology making its way into interiors, and echoes the wider interiors trend of using biophilic design elements to inspire healthier and happier spaces. Adeline’s partnering shades are Stirling Green, Popsicle and Stone.
"These products can be used anywhere, in any type of room - it really depends on what type of mood you want to create," says Taylor of the Wallpaper and Color of the Year 2020. "Commercially, the Bloomsbury Neo-Mint wallpaper (and the other three wallpapers in this collection) would look great in hotel rooms and other hospitality environments. The Adeline green would really suit restaurants or bars for that dramatic, deep, outside-in feel that taps into the biophilic trend."
The entire Graham & Brown paint range of nearly 400 colors, including the Color of the Year 2020, are available in the U.S starting September 2019.
Read next: Sherwin-Williams 2020 Color of the Year Is Timeless, Bold
