One of their most popular ranges – and Martin’s own favourite – is the 17th century flower prints

One of their most popular ranges – and Martin’s own favourite – is the 17th century flower prints.”They have a strength and simplicity to them, unlike the fluffier Victorian prints. They are more masculine, so men are happy to have flower prints in the room.” Twelve botanical images, representing one for each month of the year, are now being set in mirrors, made in the French style using gold and silver leaf. At pounds 185 each plus VAT, they are proving very popular with collectors.At those prices, however, customers aren’t likely to be buying on impulse. Definitely cheaper and undeniably cheerful is the print range produced by Wiltshire-based Handmade Designs.At the recent Country Living Fair at the Business Design Centre in London, their’s was one of the few stands – among a sea of lumpy ethnic jumpers and sackcloth frocks – worth the scrum to get into. A repro “Poppies” (Papaver laciniatum rubrum) taken from the 1613 edition of Basilius Besler’s “Hortus Eystettensis” costs pounds 250, framed Antique Beslers range from pounds 800 to pounds 3,500. As an extra, anyone buying a number of prints from the gallery, and unsure about their skill as a picture hanger, is offered the services of an expert hanger.Moving on from “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” beginnings, the company is now firmly fixed in the upper end of the framed prints market. The son of an Admiral who was the last British Governor of Western Australia, Martin says his introduction to marketing art was “selling dodgy fake oil paintings door-to-door in the Sydney suburbs.”
Preparing to visit his family during his holidays from Oxford University, he went through old copies of the Illustrated London News and ripped out pictures of Western Australia.

Print subjects cover everything from animals, fruit and domestic interiors to architectural drawings and medieval manuscripts. For an outlay of a fiver each, on his arrival in WA he sold them for pounds 150 each. Cheering work for an impecunious student who admits that being the son of the Governor was very useful in business.The youthful entrepreneur’s ambition was, at the end of his degree course, to earn as much as his friends who went into banking, but doing half the work He appears to have succeeded. Now 36, Martin employs 50 staff, has a gallery in London’s King’s Road and three more in the US.One of the major influences on the current fashions in prints and frames, he says, is the move towards using stronger, more unusual colours in fabrics and paint.

Farrow and Ball and the National Trust paints palette has encouraged decorators into bolder schemes. “Nobody would have looked at sepia five years ago, but it is popular now because it won’t clash with the room.”The Trowbridge Gallery sells antique and repro framed prints, prices varying according to rarity of the image. “Certain parts of Surrey and Berkshire are particularly popular with relocating employees, mostly Americans, who all want the right house on the right bus route near the right school. There isn’t enough to go round, so they will pay big premiums”.. Artists may wince at the suggestion, but most people choosing pictures to hang in their homes pick ones that will match the curtains.