I grew up in a house filled with wonderful wallpaper, patterns that surrounded me long before I ever understood why they mattered, absorbed quietly rather than consciously noticed. I learned my trade properly years later, painting murals and chinoiserie in country estates across the UK, working straight onto walls long before I ever thought about designing wallpaper of my own. I think that's where the detail in my work comes from. Customers often tell me they keep noticing something new in a design months after buying it, and that thoughtfulness, the sense that there's always another layer to find, matters more to me than almost anything else they could say about my work.
Birds have followed me since I was a child, through memories of my family home, years of travelling, and a habit of working late into the night with a paintbrush in hand. There's such beauty in them: the colour of a wing, the shape of a flight path, the gift of song they give us without ever asking for anything in return. I think that's why I can't stop painting them. Swallows, ravens, larks and owls keep turning up across my collections, not because I set out to build a signature, but because they feel like a gift, and painting them is my way of passing that on.
For years, my work meant painting inside other people's houses, travelling from one estate to the next with a paintbrush in hand. When I became a mother, that way of working no longer fitted the smaller, busier life I needed to build. So I found another way: turning my hand-painted surfaces into wallpaper, fabric, prints and decals that could go out into people's homes instead of me, carrying the same detail and care into rooms I'll probably never see in person.
My work has been commissioned for commercial clients and private individuals, and shown in galleries and art spaces in and around London.
I try to make the way I work honour the same world I paint. Kate Walton Collections is a vegan brand, printed on FSC-certified paper with non-toxic ink, and through my partnership with Ecologi, we plant a tree together with every single order — your purchase, my pledge, one tree at a time.
