Tulip and Lattice Bookmark

Adaptation from a Charles Rennie Mackintosh fabric design, c. 1915–1923

To Charles Rennie Mackintosh, architecture proceeded from the inside out. While this notion would later become a Modernist truism (and although Mackintosh imposed the rule judiciously rather than inflexibly), his buildings were as much about what was in them—their furnishings and decor—as about their exteriors.

Many designers of his time employed stenciling to add interest to interior walls, but Mackintosh’s stencils—clean-lined, cheerful, and deceptively simple—stand in sharp contrast to the fussy Victorian tangles that the mainstream favored. The stencil adapted for this bookmark graced the walls of Hill House (1902–1904), the architect’s most important residential commission.