Wallpaper Designer Tony Roche becomes Original Features' Wallpaper Expert

Tony Roche is a gifted wallpaper designer, Set Designer and wallpaper historian. Tony's passion for wallpaper design developed in his early days. His father was working in the decorating business and his grandfather was a professional marbler and pattern maker.  He acknowledges their influence on him.

"Apart from learning by observing my father while he was working, I was quite inquisitive and used to read a lot of decorating books. I was mostly passionate with the Art Deco and Art Nouveau patterns.I wanted to learn about the older pattern techniques, and since finding information about this niche subject was very hard in my Irish hometown of Waterford, I decided to move to London."

On arriving in London, Tony was a regular visitor to The Victoria & Albert Museum library researching 19th century wallpapers, pattern and texture books - "It was a spark and I still have sketchbooks of sketches I took from books back then for reference". 

Based on his extensive research Roche later published the book Decorating with Stencils.

In London, Tony joined the BBC as a scene painter where he worked on major production projects.   

Film Set floors must be completely flat in order to allow a sleek camera move with absolutely no unwanted movements or noises, the floors are hand painted. Tony is skilled at painting any kind of floor may it be wooden or geometric tiled in order to make the audience believe that this is a real floor.

One of his latest projects was working on the Hollywood blockbuster X-Men where Tony designed wallpaper patterns inspired by works of the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer.  "I loved making a wallpaper for X-Men it was great. After creating many wallpaper samples for the production's designers I was given the artistic freedom to create my own pattern.  I ended up working on the design in my kitchen for ten days in a row, with hardly any sleep."

 Tony is also an experienced wallpaper fitter. One of his latest projects involved fitting of a silver leafed wallpaper made by a Japanese designer worth £1000 a roll. For this project, only one wall of the living room was covered. "It is fashionable these days to cover only one salient wall of a room with outstanding wallpaper which gives a unique feel and tone for the whole room without creating too much of a visual noise".

Tony was recently commisioned to design some wallpapers for a new film adaption of the Tolstoy novel Anna Karenina.