The Smallest Room - August 2026 - Look Book By Paul

There’s one room in every Irish house that gets no respect: the loo under the stairs. The smallest room. The WC. The jax, if we’re being honest with each other.

And yet the design world worked this out years ago — the smallest room is the best room in the house to have fun in.

Nobody has to live with your bravest idea for more than five minutes at a time, so it’s the one space where you can go a little bit crazy.

The celebrities know it too. Oscar winners famously keep the statuette on the cistern in the downstairs loo, where every guest holds it and does a speech.

Others cut out their worst reviews and paste them on the walls for all to consider. Some even have a guest book.

The smallest room is where confidence goes on display.

One of the fastest and most practical ideas for you: a cloakroom only takes three or four metres of wallcovering, so you can afford the really good stuff — the hand-finished, museum-grade papers that would cost a fortune in a sitting room.

And the best of the good stuff, for my money, comes from Arte International, the Belgian wallcovering house whose sample books have taken over my desk all summer. We’ll be bringing a selection of their wallcoverings to Ballincollig soon — watch this space.

In the meantime, here are four Arte designs I think are pure fun in a small room — each shown in Arte’s own imagery, used with our thanks and linked to their page — and the pairing I’d put with each from our shop floor today.

Other image credits: our Pinterest board

The bravest papers coming out of Europe right now are practically zoology — and my favourite, Menagerie of Extinct Animals by Moooi × Arte International, hides ten extinct animals in a single soft-touch textile repeat. Guests come out of the loo asking, ‘Is that a dodo?’ (It was.)

That’s exactly what the smallest room is for. Wrap all four walls — yes, the ceiling too if you’re feeling it — then keep everything else warm and natural so the print stays the star: aged brass for the light, honest pale oak for the one piece of furniture. More fun please.

The finest thing I’ve seen this year is Bouquet, from Arte International’s Les Tapisseries collection — a wallcovering woven to echo a historic tapestry hanging in the Rijksmuseum. An airy, open weave with faded florals that looks centuries old the day it goes up.

In a big room that could tip into ‘castle tour’. In the smallest room it’s magic: you close the door and you’re standing inside a painting. Treat the walls as the art — then light them like art, with a proper picture light — and choose furniture with age in its bones. Hand-turned oak, nothing shiny.

Arte International’s Prismatic collection behaves like a prism on your wall — light hits it, breaks apart and scatters into colour, woven through natural raffia and hemp so it never feels plasticky. My pick is Refraction, in Green Lagoon or the gloriously loud Marigold. On a landing it would exhaust you. In the loo it’s two minutes of pure delight, several times a day.

The trick with wild colour is to let the shapes do the talking: keep the ware white, then echo the paper with lighting that plays the same game — mosaic glass that throws colour, a lamp with iridescent spheres floating inside it. That’s exciting.

‘Powder room’ is the only estate-agent phrase I actually like, because it tells you how to style it: like somewhere a 1920s guest would touch up before dinner. My paper here is Kashmir, from Arte International’s Indienne collection — a panoramic print drawn from antique Indian shawls, and one two-by-three-metre panel covers a cloakroom wall almost exactly.

Then you dress it like a jewellery box: a lamp in gold leaf on a black marble base, and a proper brass light beside the mirror — one that’s actually rated for a bathroom, because vintage looks should never come with vintage wiring.