How Cottage Fields Design Developed from Idea to Wallpaper
Cottage Fields didn't start with a blank page. It started with my niece.
She came to me wanting a wallpaper with a botanical cottage feel, and instead of starting fresh, I went to the archive I already had. Years of drawings, watercolor paintings, photographs, and cyanotypes, all pulled from the same source: the field across from my home on Lake Murray, where dogwoods bloom in spring, and Queen Anne's Lace and greenery take over by summer.
So the first real step in making Cottage Fields wasn't sketching. It was gathering. I laid out work made in completely different mediums — ink and watercolor studies of botanicals, cyanotype prints where the plant itself had left its shadow on the paper, photographs I'd taken on my walks — and started looking for how they could sit together.
Building the Field, Not Just the Flowers
This is where Cottage Fields is different from a lot of my other patterns. I wasn't painting one motif and repeating it. I was combining pieces that already existed — some loose and gestural, some more graphic and stark from the cyanotype process, some photographic — and arranging them so the whole thing reads the way a real field does: layered, a little wild, nothing lined up too perfectly.
A cyanotype works by capturing the shadow of a real plant directly onto the paper, so what came out of that process had a completely different texture than my watercolor sketches — more graphic, higher contrast, almost architectural. Combining that with the softness of a painted botanical was part of what gives Cottage Fields its depth. It doesn't feel like one hand made one thing. It feels like a field does — many textures, many plants, one place. Select the Image Below to View!
Finding the Color Story
Cottage Fields didn't start with one color story — it grew into three.
The original request from my niece was for green, so that's how it was born: a botanical cottage feel in shades of green, built entirely around what she wanted for her own home. Once it was finished and she sent me pictures of it installed, I loved it enough to put the design up in my shop.
That's when the color story kept evolving. A customer saw it and loved the pattern itself but wanted something different — a deep, dark taupe instead of green, for a completely different mood in the space. I made the shift, and that taupe colorway became its own version of the design, moody and dramatic against brass and stone in a way the original green never was.
Seeing the pattern hold up in two such different palettes told me something: the design itself was strong enough to carry more than one identity. So I made a third decision, not driven by a client this time but by my own brand — a soft light blue, on both fabric and wallpaper, chosen specifically to complement my brand colors and give Cottage Fields a version that felt like it belonged in the shop alongside my other collections.
Three colorways, three different reasons for existing — a client's vision, another client's request, and my own instinct for what the brand needed. That's usually how color decisions go for me. They're rarely made once.
Designing for the Feel of a Field
This is the step that turns individual pieces into a wallpaper, and for Cottage Fields, the repeat wasn't just a technical decision — it was the whole point. I wasn't trying to create a tidy, evenly spaced pattern. I was trying to create the appearance of an actual field of wild botanicals, the kind you'd walk through and see growing at every height and angle, never quite lined up.
Elements needed to feel scattered and organic rather than gridded, even though underneath it, there's still a structure making sure it tiles seamlessly across a wall.
Knowing The Completed Design Was A Success
Seeing the smile on my niece's face, that's the moment that told me this design had done its job. Every commission I take on has the same aim: to give a client a design that becomes part of the story of their home. Custom design work is where that happens most directly — instead of designing for a general audience, everything from the first sketch to the final repeat is built around one home, one room, one story. A homeowner or designer commissioning a custom piece is getting this exact process, personalized entirely to their space, which isn't something you'll find at a big-box retailer or a mass-market fabric house.
From the Field to Your Wall
Cottage Fields is one of my best-selling wallpapers for a reason — it started as something real, and I think people can feel that. If you're drawn to it, you can find it (along with the rest of the collection) at loribattagliadesigns.shop. And if you're picturing something built specifically around your own space, that's exactly what custom design is for — reach out and let's start there.