In my designing, I use little-known sources and a love of historic patterns to glorify the ordinary; my mission is to enhance my clients’ joy in their everyday surroundings

Long ago—back in 1880—William Morris, poet and reformer, delivered that message in a lecture, “The Beauty of Life.” His mission, he told his audience at the Birmingham (England) Society of Arts, was “to revive a sense of beauty in home life, to restore the dignity of art to the ordinary household decoration.”

And, as a master craftsman, he did just that, co-founding, in 1861, the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company (later Morris & Co.) for the production of high-quality furnishings. Morris had a genius for pattern design, whether his material was wallpaper, fabric, furniture, stained glass, tapestry, carpet, or tiles; he created objects of such enduring beauty that they have remained in continuous production for more than 130 years.

Morris’s philosophy (that everyone deserves to live in a beautiful house) fueled his art (the creation of beautiful decorative art for that house). The heart of his work was always good design, with an emphasis on simplicity. In changing the way we look at our homes, Morris changed the way we look at the world.

As an interior designer, my mission, too, is to create beautiful everyday surroundings. I find it delightful that, working in the 21st century, I can adorn homes with the designs of a Victorian-era Englishman whose work sparked the Arts and Crafts movement. (Morris’s successful mission was to re-establish the value of hand-crafted work in the industrial 19th century—to raise taste levels so that the public once again desired ordinary objects that were handsome and well-made.)

Most of the patterns have not been printed for many, many years. Morris’s revolutionary designs were based on his study of native plants and of textile themes dating back to medieval times: trees, flowers, birds, fruits, and animals. He had an abiding interest in making use of the past as inspiration for the present. Most of us have seen Morris’s designs, with their intricate intertwining and layering of organic forms, gracing the walls of historic manor homes and in movies or television shows set in the early part of the 20th century.

Depending on the pattern, a Morris design will enhance a room in almost any home, whether it’s a townhouse in the city or a house on the beach, but the designs are always picture perfect in any room of a country house. The Chrysanthemum pattern, in varying shades of soft green, yellow, beige, and crème, was perfect in the stairhall of a country house I recently designed. Trellis, Morris’s first wallpaper design, probably inspired by the rose trellis at “Red House,” his home in Kent, is one of my favorites; I used it in one of the bedrooms. I could not resist using Myrtle and Sunflower to enliven the upstairs of a Shingle Style beach house, since the flowers grow wild nearby, and Honeysuckle looks scrumptious in light pink, pale greens, beige and crème in a child’s room.

Most designers and their clients are unaware that these patters are still available for printing. Arthur Sanderson & Sons Ltd, founded in 1865 in London, acquired Morris & Co. in 1923, complete with the original woodblock inventory. A few machine-produced Morris designs are available, but I rarely use them. I custom-order from Sanderson’s New York showroom.

To make the wallpaper patterns look new and fresh, I have them re-colored, using delicious hues from a Benjamin Moore color wheel, with its thousands of paint colors to choose from: Key lime, sweet pea, lemon drops, delicate rose, pale almond, Devon cream, Yorkshire tan…

Producing hand-blocked wallpapers, a process that has not changed since the 17th century, is slow and laborious and can be accomplished only by very skilled craftsmen. But what an exquisite result! The shading has a complexity and subtlety impossible to achieve through mass production; indeed, the process—imprinting the design on the highest-quality paper using 15 or 20 blocks, each adding a separate shade—produces an embossed pattern.

The craftsmen’s first task is the mixing and approval of each color to be used. Each color in the design requires a separate, hand-carved, heavy (40-pound) wooden block on which the design is drawn and carved. Then it is pressed onto the paper by hand. After one color is applied, the paper must dry overnight before subsequent blocks, each with its own design and color, can be applied.