Pattern for success
Ashley Woodson Bailey’s love of photography and floral design come together in dramatic fashion when the larger-than-life details are used in wallpaper and fabrics
Giant peonies and other flowers are breathtaking against their dark background in the Dutch Love wallpaper pattern created by native Texan Ashley Woodson Bailey. With its grand scale and dramatic design, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would be surprised at its popularity.
Bailey, a Corpus Christi native and former Houstonian who now lives in Jacksonville, Fla., never set out to be a photographer or a designer of wallpaper and fabric, but it’s where her life journey took her. And now she’ll bring her wallpaper and love of floral design and photography — “florography” as she calls it — here for the 66th annual Theta Charity and Antiques Show, Friday-Sunday at the George R. Brown Convention Center.
“Dutch Love is the one I launched with, and its flowers are larger than my
head,” said Bailey, 45, who is the show’s honorary design chair. “It has such a dark background that I was surprised so many people were drawn to it.”
Whether you’re talking about art or design, everyone sees it differently, and that’s true for Bailey’s large-scale patterns, especially Dutch Love.
“I felt like there is a very specific clientele who wants a dark, brooding design like that. I thought of an older woman in a living room with her cats and patterns on patterns on patterns, smoking a cigarette and drinking bourbon,” she said with no small amount of her own drama. “Now, people are putting it in their powder bathrooms and in daughters’ nurseries. I love the way people see it — art is different to everyone.”
When Bailey launched her wallpaper line a few years ago, she was perfectly aligned with the resurgence in popularity of wallcoverings of all kinds. More importantly, it was the next natural career progression for Bailey, who never set out to be anything other than a floral designer.
She’ll show off her newest pattern — Fay, a striking combination of gorgeous flowers, delicate birds and an edgy coiled snake — and demonstrate how to create beautiful flower arrangements at the Theta show.
To expand the longtime show to reach an audience beyond the diminishing antiques market, Theta organizers added Designer Walks in 2015 and Art Walks in 2016, both of which bring interior designers and art experts to the show with walking-talking lessons on using art and antiques in home design. Though French antiques remain popular, the demand for antiques has dropped as a new generation of shoppers and home buyers — those influential millennials — seems to want nothing to do with their parents’ and grandparents’ taste.
This year, designer/art walks will be lead by Houston interior designers Paloma Contreras, Courtnay Tartt Elias, Courtney Hill Fertitta, J. Randall Powers and Hallie Henley Sims as well as garden/floral/interior designer James Farmer, William Reaves/Sarah Foltz Fine Art owner Sarah Foltz and MKG Art management owner Melissa Kepke Grobmyer.
Additionally, Contreras, Farmer, New York designer Miles Redd, Atlanta designer Suzanne Kasler, and style setter and businesswoman Carolyne Roehm will all have book signings scattered throughout the weekend schedule.
Bailey is a University of Texas grad who was a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority; its Houston Alumnae Chapter launched the antiques show in 1952 at the Shamrock Hotel. Though Bailey lived in Houston for eight years working as a floral designer for the Bergner and Johnson event/floral design companies, she never attended the Theta show.
After 20 years as a full-time florist, Bailey was involved in a head-on collision that left her with a broken back. Those labor-intensive, largescale events she was involved in were no longer physically possible — her body couldn’t handle them.
She spent seven months in a back brace, and to relieve the boredom she took up photography. She took gorgeous pictures of flowers that people brought to her and posted them on Instagram. Interior designers noticed, and by 2014, they were buying them as framable art prints. Those clients then envisioned them on glamorous wallpaper, and a year later, Dutch Love was born.
“Once I got into the wallpaper world, I realized how many people loved wallpaper, and there are so many designers out there who design for very different taste levels,” she said. “I was just creating something for clients who asked for it, with no expectation that it would go anywhere. The moment I knew it was popular was the first time I had it hung and I called an installer, and they couldn’t do it for three months.”
Her flowers are her muse, and her wallpaper patterns come about fairly organically. She said any time she creates a floral design expecting it to be wallpaper, those patterns never sell.
Dutch Love was the first and remains her most popular pattern, but now she has more than 40 patterns in different colors, and many come in fabric, too. Some are pretty feminine styles while others are bold and dramatic. Her Into the Garden pattern in black will be on a wall at the show’s entry, and the gold version can be found elsewhere.
People will see her Fay pattern for the first time at the show — it’s named after her grandmother and has an ecru background with pink peonies and ranunculus, some green grapes, a bird and even a snake, including photographed and handpainted elements. She’ll even sell scarves with the Fay pattern on them.
“My favorite part of my job now is that I get to choose whatever color palette I want to work with, whatever flowers I want to work with. I don’t have to follow a theme for a party someone is throwing,” she said. “When I am most inspired by the flowers is when the wallpaper becomes something that is magical. The flowers truly are my muse.”