By a curious turn of fate, one of the world’s largest collections of works relating to the British arts and crafts designer and utopian socialist William Morris is kept on American shores. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens (established in San Marino, California, in 1919 to house the collection of anglophile Henry E Huntington) is a destination for Morris enthusiasts, housing the private collection of Sanford and Helen Berger — one of the world’s premier assemblages of 19th-century arts and crafts. The archive includes an extensive collection of Morris & Co, the decorative arts manufacturer and retailer that was co-founded by the designer, with artefacts spanning tapestries, wallpaper, books and political pamphlets.
Much was made of the collection’s treasures when The Huntington purchased it for $5.5mn in 1999. It included a Morris-designed 20ft by 10ft stained-glass window, but there were smaller items among the 7,850 objects such as sketchbooks and parchments filled with unfinished drawings and paintings. These ephemera remained largely undisturbed — seeds of ideas by Morris and his Pre-Raphaelite collaborators: some drawn in pencil, others painted in vivid colour, and many no larger than a matchbox. It formed the basis of a time capsule waiting to be rediscovered.
Sanderson design director Claire Vallis at the Voysey House showroom © Niall Hodson
Lynsey Hand, The Huntington’s retail business development manager, decided to unleash its potential in 2022 while sifting through the archives in search of designs that would have commercial appeal in the Library’s store. “The store team and I met with Melinda McCurdy, the Library’s curator of British art, to view the collection first hand and gain a deeper appreciation of its remarkable scope. Knowing how special our collection was, we wanted to find the most relevant and authentic partner to help bring these unfinished works to life.” Hand made a call to the British wallpaper and fabrics manufacturer, Sanderson Design Group, which has owned Morris & Co since the 1940s (its portfolio also includes Sanderson, Zoffany, Harlequin, Clarke & Clarke and Scion), and proposed a collaboration to complete the works. Next month, Morris & Co will unveil a collection of never-before-seen designs spanning wallpaper, fabrics and borders, having spent two years completing the paintings and sketches envisaged by William Morris, his successor John Henry Dearle and Dearle’s son Duncan. Titled The Unfinished Works (fabric from £126 per metre, wallpaper from £122 per roll and borders from £60 per roll), the collection adds 50 creations to the 250 designs already in circulation — the first new Morris & Co designs for a century.
Morris & Co x The Huntington Scrolling Tulip wallpaper in gold © Niall Hodson
Artwork for the Meda Iris design © Niall Hodson
“Completing these artworks has been a dream come true for us,” says Sanderson’s design director Claire Vallis as she unfurls a roll of brightly patterned fabric across a table at Voysey House, a hangar-like 1902 arts and crafts building in Chiswick, London, which has been Sanderson Design Group’s HQ since 2024. “We’ve gone about this in the best way possible — to finish them as intended,” she continues, adjusting her thick-rimmed glasses to inspect the pattern against a copy of the original drawing. “We put them back as close as we could to the original, while creating repeats in designs that never had them because they were intended as stained glass or tapestries. Everything is painted by hand.” She looks up and grins. “It’s quite literally been a labour of love — Jess Clayworth, who is the lead designer on the project, found out she was pregnant at the start of the process and had the baby by the time this was born.”
Vallis inspects the Lent Lily fabric from The Unfinished Works © Niall Hodson
Vallis compares the project to a type of detective work. “We’ve used our own archive, which includes original wood blocks and first prints, quite extensively. Obviously Morris relied very much on symmetry, so we’ve tried to keep this in mind with everything we’ve done: from the brush marks to how the leaves are finished.”
The team’s archivist Caitlin Stracey appears with a Morris & Co logbook, which would have been used by Victorian block printers to review the design and colours of a pattern as it rolled off the presses. Much the same work is done today on Sanderson’s 100-year-old surface printers, which replicate hand block printing using semi-automated machines. “We have coloured the designs using some of the original documents, and also dropped in colours from the archives, which actually feel fresh and modern,” says Vallis. “We’ve even gone down the rabbit hole of what flowers might have been selected.” Adds Stracey: “The documents come from different sources and times, and the intended purpose was not always clear. Some things had little notes and annotations to say what they were going to be, such as embroidery or a carpet, but others did not.” Vallis nods in agreement. “It was like stepping back in time into Morris’s shoes — and trying to do him justice,” she says.
Fabric and artworks for the collection’s Persian Tulip design © Niall Hodson
A selection of wallpapers and wallpaper borders in the Voysey House showroom © Niall Hodson
We head over to a table in the corner of the room where copies of The Huntington papers are assembled. Vallis points to a pencil drawing on parchment paper — a repeat of a single flower encircled by swirling stems of leaves. “See here,” she says, “it’s an inscription by William Morris.” A goosebump moment. This design has been nicknamed “Chamomile”, a nod to the daisy-like flowers that Morris sketched somewhere between 1865 and 1870. (Even naming the new designs has been an interesting exercise: “Morris tended to name things from the smallest part of the designs,” says Vallis.) Intended as an embroidery, it bears all the hallmarks of his hand.
“What has been so interesting about this project is that the designs are so familiar even though you’ve never seen them,” says Vallis. “You recognise the flow, which is so indicative of the arts and crafts. It would be wonderful if one of these could be the next Golden Lily [a design created in 1899 by John Henry Dearle], which is so instantly recognisable.”
Vallis at the Voysey House showroom © Niall Hodson
John Henry Dearle’s unfinished artworks underpin several designs in the new collection. In one tiny sketch, believed to have been created for a carpet in the 1880s, he has drawn a repeating pattern of honeysuckle-like blooms within a grid, and in just one section, employed glorious brush strokes of pinks and greens to bring it all to life. Reimagined as a collection of wallpapers and fabrics, “Walthamstow” is a reference to the borough in which Morris’s family lived, at Water House, now the William Morris Gallery. In another painting by Dearle of the same period, intended as wallpaper, large blousy flowers peek from undulating stripes reminiscent of the bars of an iron gate; these now feature in a design named Cornflower.
“The embroideries are my favourite,” Vallis says as we admire Voysey House’s showroom: a space of riotous pattern and colour where vast wallpaper panels are framed floor-to-ceiling and fabrics hang in rows. “We worked with several mills to create some really beautiful embroideries, and we’ve also produced jacquards. Many of those designs were originally going to be carpets, so we’ve transposed them on to heavy tapestry-style fabric.”
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There are new twists too. “We’ve taken little elements from the designs and made them into stripes and checks,” Vallis continues. “And we’ve used warp printing techniques to create designs with a worn look. The possibilities are endless. We’re also doing wall murals and we’ve been inspired to start producing borders again, too.”
Completing the collection has been a career highlight. “As designers, you go to college and hear about the work of William Morris, but then to be suddenly finishing a design he started . . . that is really something,” Vallis says. “Morris famously said, ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’ We are Morris & Co, his original company. His legacy continues.”