Sales of leopard skin wallpaper at B&Q are yet another indicator of the nation’s increasing willingness to walk on the wild side in their DIY excursions, leaving the bland far behind.
The niggardly banks can take the blame for the new popularity of pattern of every type from the graphic to the floral. Homeowners who cannot obtain competitively priced mortgages are barred from moving up the property ladder.
But this frees them to be more exuberant in their homewares choices: they need not fear the disapproval of prospective purchasers.
B&Q’s success with a print, formerly mostly associated with Bet Lynch, the former landlady of the Rovers Return in Coronation Street, is also evidence of a North-South divide in the new more colourful decor preferences.
The £14.98 a roll leopard skin wallpaper — and the leopard skin print shower curtain, also £14.98, — are most popular in the North, particularly in the chain’s Middlesbrough store. A zebra print rug (£34.98) is yet more proof of this taste for nature red in tooth and claw. Customers of B&Q in the South are opting for nature at its least threatening. Here demand is strong for William Morris-ish florals such as the Eco-Divine, an environmentally friendly range, at about £11.98 a roll.
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The enthusiasm for what interior design gurus are calling “animality” is said to spring from the new conviction that a home is a home, rather than an investment, and that pets make a home.
If this is so, then B&Q seems to have uncovered a widespread fantasy for the big cat as faithful friend. Marks & Spencer is calculating that many people feel more comfortable with a domesticated animal.
Next year, this chain will be stocking dog head bookends and a cushion with the face of a Jack Russell terrier.