The Grosvenor Wilton team has supplied bespoke carpet for the Museum of the Home’s brand-new Rooms Through Time. The new 1870s parlour tells the story of a Victorian couple preparing for a séance: a meeting at which people try to make contact with the dead. Located in Hoxton, East London, the museum is a place where visitors can explore home and home life from 1600 to the present day.
A Victorian floral watercolour design created in 1846 was chosen from the Grosvenor Wilton archive and the creative studio prepared the design for manufacture. To recreate the type of Wilton Weave that would have been supplied in the 1840’s, an authentic 69cm wide Worsted Brussels Wilton 10 pitch x 12 row was selected.
The carpet was made for the new Victorian Room in the Rooms Through Time gallery at the Museum of the Home- we based the room on a surviving Victorian property in London. Once we had decided on the location of the room and some key architectural fittings our attention turned to the furnishings which would make the room feel like a home. To recreate the rich textures of a Victorian home we wanted to have an authentic loop-pile Brussels carpet made. To research the appropriate type of carpet for our room we looked at trade catalogues, design registers, domestic and furnishing advice books, paintings and prints, and inventories. Once we had an idea of the type of carpet that would be appropriate for the room, we visited Grosvenor Wilton, as they are one of the oldest carpet manufacturers in the UK, and one of a surviving few still making carpets in the traditional way, to start the initial design development. Grosvenor Wilton have an archive of original design point papers from the 1800s so we were able to choose from a selection of designs that would have been available in the 1870s. We decided upon a design dating from around the 1860s with sprays of lilies and foliage, on a burgundy ground. The naturalistic floral design, was in keeping with the mainstream Victorian taste we were trying to replicate.
