Blue and White Done Right
Actually, this title is a bit of a misnomer, since it is hard to think of a way to do blue and white decorating wrong. As Jeffrey Bilhuber writes, in Everyday Decorating (Rizzoli, 2019): “Terrified of adding pattern? Try something in blue and white. Whole books have been written about the power of this color duo. Whole careers have been based on its allure.”
The classic blue and white designs we all know and love can be created before or after the fabric is woven. When individual fibers are dyed in the iconic colors, they can then be woven to create ikats, plaids, ginghams, stripes, checks, and true denim. Fabric woven in a single color can have a design in the other color applied, creating a blue pattern on a white ground, or the reverse, using printing or embroidery, or dyed with a resist technology, such as shibori and batik.
Blue and white patterns nearly always mix easily and effortlessly, whether your goal is an eclectic look gathered over time, or a neat, ship-shape look inspired by the sea. You can pair a blue ikat with denim, gingham, chintz, checks, toile de Jouy, and/or plaid. Or mix them all together! A classic look is to place blue and white pillows on a sofa slipcovered in a crisp white duck or faded navy blue denim. In spring you could brighten the look with lime green accents, and in summer you could add a punch of red for a patriotic touch. Maybe all you need to do come fall and winter is to remove the slipcover from your cozy sofa or bring in some candles and accessories in deeper earthy colors or jewel tones. You may want to use blue and white seasonally as we do, relying on blue and white textiles to cheer up our living room in spring, and to cool off our kitchen in summer.
Another easy option is to use a one or two blue and white textiles in a room for all the soft furnishings: drapery, upholstery, and pillows. A more labor-intensive approach would be to pattern drench a powder room or small bedroom in one blue and white pattern for both wallpaper and fabric. On the second floor of our house, you pass through an unfinished attic space at the top of the stairs to reach two upstairs rooms. We’ve used bookcases, a dresser, and a wardrobe to create a hallway in the space (and for much needed storage both in the furniture and behind it). Then we splurged on a single large scale upholstery remnant, Michelle Nussbaumer’s Palampur Parrot in indigo, a blue and white tree of life design.
The print is at such a large scale that our four-yard remnant had less than two pattern repeats, but it was enough to make a curtain and several table scarves which introduced unity to an otherwise undefined space filled with a hodge podge of mismatched furniture.
However, in smaller doses, blue and white can have a moment in any room; it does not need to be the star, it does not need to be fabric or wallpaper, and it really doesn’t even need to match the overall décor in the room. We’ve all seen photos of charming English kitchens and drawing rooms, with their collections of blue and white pottery on shelves, tables, and fireplace mantles. They may be displaying a large set of heirloom dishes, a single vessel, or a mix of blue and white with other collected pieces. The classic interiors demonstrate that blue and white works against plaster walls, pastel or deeply tinted paint, landscape murals, stained paneling, and even block print wallpaper. The first image I chose to illustrate this post is of a corner of our dining room, where the walls are red and the textiles are differently scaled florals in green, pink, and even black. Here a gateleg table, built by my great-great-grandfather more than 150 years ago, holds an assortment of chinoiserie, flow blue, and delft, some of which are heirlooms, while others came from Goodwill and dime stores Despite their disparate origins, they play well together and hold their own without clashing with the other elements of our exuberant dining room.
The fact that so many people display their heirloom and collected blue and white pottery hints at another element of its appeal: this color combo is timeless rather than trendy. The pairing of blue and white is bound by neither time nor place; it’s employed in Chinese pottery, Japanese shibori, Indonesian batik, Indian block prints, and Dutch delft, English Staffordshire, and French toile. Indigo, one of the most common blue dyes for fabric, has been used all over the world for at least 6,000 years. That’s not to suggest that all blue and white patterns exist outside of a geographic or historical context, or that they can’t be culturally appropriated; rather that many cultures and times have told their stories and furnished their homes with blue and white designs, and we can too.
One place you can find blue and white pillow covers is in our blue and white collection, but we also have blue and white pillow covers in our other collections, so browse them all, and enjoy some effortless decorating!