And you thought wallpaper would be the last dwelling for shocking imagery. With the Timorous Beasties in control, the design pendulum swings towards the wicked and the pioneering

They may be called Timorous Beasties after a poem by the Scotsman Robert Burns. But there is nothing timorous about them whatsoever. Their design philosophy seems to be the opposite, in fact.

“Court jesters of the textiles world,” The Observer calls them. “Design agitators,” says Scotland on Sunday.

Baby fetuses, Tse Tse flies, layers of veins, syringes, and various germs. Not the first images that come to mind when you think of what people might want to see in their living room while sipping tea. Yet these are some of the patterns on their lampshades.

Baby fetuses, Tse Tse flies, layers of veins . . . not the first images that come to mind when you think of what people might want to see in their living room. 

Consider druggies shooting up, drunks swigging straight from a bottle, men urinating in a park, or people being mugged at gunpoint. Not your typical wallpaper or textile designs. But Timorous Beasties are actually renowned for pulling such urban scenes from twenty-first century Britain, and printing them on pretty wallpaper.

This is their serious yet playful take on the toile, a fabric depicting rural scenes that was produced in France in the eighteenth century. They’ve produced a Glasgow toile, a London toile, and an Edinburgh toile. Rather than put off buyers—as might be expected in say, the Philippines, where a gunman is a bit too close to home for comfort—a touch of social realism has become Timorous Beasties’ selling point and distinguishing stamp.

It helps too, of course, that their wallpapers and fabrics are done in gorgeous and unusual colors and combinations like fuschia and moss green on charcoal gray, gold on ivory, cotton candy pink on watermelon red, or black on black.
The pairing of elements from the natural world like bees, orchids, thistle, and iguanas with exquisite color combinations infuses their work with a contemporary look that has won them critical and commercial success far beyond their native Scotland.

Paul Simmons and Alistair McAuley met as students at the Glasgow School of Art in the mid 1980s. Brought together by a love of craft, a load of mutual friends, and a desire to produce their own work, the duo set up their company in 1990.

When they were just starting out, Simmons remembers telling people they were into wallpaper and “you could see their faces kind of crumple up like you’d let off a bad smell.” That was during the minimalist Nineties. Today, designers use wallpaper in a radically different way. Wallpaper is the new art.

In 2007, Timorous Beasties were invited to co-curate an exhibition on the influence of the natural world in design. Held at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland, they featured their own work alongside contemporary and historical works.

“Timorous Beasties provided a completely fresh view on the nature of the contemporary art space,” writes DCA director Clive Gilman, “providing a profound level of gravitas without being burdensome and ensuring an air of levity without being trivial.”

This pretty much sums up what Timorous Beasties is about: never timorous; rather, humorous. In an earlier interview, Paul Simmons recounted how he found himself unintentionally eavesdropping as an elderly lady admired the lush pink of a Timorous Beasties fabric. At that precise moment, he remembers thinking: “Six months from now, someone is going to point out the gunman on her sofa.”