Chinoiserie Desk Mats & Vintage Mouse Pads

How to choose your chinoiserie desk mat

Eight designs, and they split by how much of the pattern you want to live with.

Blue and white landscapes

Mountains, water, pavilions, all in the cobalt-on-cream palette borrowed from porcelain. Calm from a distance, detailed up close, and the most classically chinoiserie thing here. Start with the blue landscape or the mountain landscape.

Birds and branches

Cranes, songbirds, blossom on bare branches. Lighter than the landscapes, with more empty space around the subject, so they sit under a cluttered desk without adding to the noise. See the vintage bird and the bird chinoiserie desk pad.

Florals on blue

Peonies and foliage filling the whole surface. These are the boldest of the eight and the ones that read as wallpaper rather than artwork — which is exactly right if the rest of the desk is plain. The floral blue landscape.

The William Morris one

Not chinoiserie strictly speaking — it's English Arts and Crafts — but it lives here because it does the same job: dense vintage pattern, muted palette, nothing modern about it. The William Morris peacock is the best-seller of the eight.

Pattern and screen glare

Dense patterns are busier in peripheral vision than a plain mat, which some people find distracting over a long working day and others never notice. If it's your first patterned mat, the bird designs have the most empty space and are the gentler way in.

Which size

These are landscapes, so the 16" × 32" is where they make sense — you get the whole scene instead of a corner of it. At 9" × 7" you're looking at a crop, which works for the bird designs and not for the mountains.