Unikko: Maija Isola's 1964 Poppy from Fabric to Tableware

Few patterns are recognised from across a room the way the Unikko poppy is. This piece traces where it came from, why a flower print was a bold move for Marimekko in 1964, and how the same drawing now reads on stoneware, birch plywood, sateen and percale.

A textile house that printed almost no flowers

Marimekko was founded in Helsinki in 1951 by Armi and Viljo Ratia. Its early identity was built on printed cotton with strong, simple graphics: stripes, blocks of colour and abstract shapes cut large enough to be read at the scale of a dress or a curtain. That approach set the company apart from the small, fussy florals common in furnishing fabrics of the period, and floral motifs were almost entirely absent from its collections.

The story most often told is that Armi Ratia herself did not want Marimekko to print flowers, on the grounds that a printed flower could never match a real one. Maija Isola, one of the house's leading designers, answered by doing the opposite. She was fascinated by flowers, and in 1964 she drew a whole range of new floral prints. Unikko, Finnish for poppy, was among them, and it is the one that stayed.

What Maija Isola actually drew

Look closely at Unikko and the reason it works becomes clear. The poppies are flat, rounded forms with no shading, no stems to speak of and no attempt at botanical accuracy. Each bloom is a cluster of broad petals around a dark centre, and the flowers are packed so tightly that the background becomes a second set of shapes in its own right. It is drawn the way the earlier Marimekko geometrics were drawn: bold enough to hold together when it is metres wide, simple enough to survive a change of colour.

That second quality matters. Over the decades Unikko has been printed in a very wide spread of colourways, from the familiar red on white to soft neutrals and deep blues, and the drawing never loses its identity. Some product descriptions credit the pattern to Maija and Kristina Isola; Kristina, Maija's daughter, worked alongside her mother at Marimekko and later took part in developing new colourways for the archive of prints. Marimekko has come to treat the poppy as a symbol of creativity, which is a fair reading of a pattern that began as a quiet act of defiance.

Back on cloth: the tablecloth and the duvet cover

Unikko was conceived as a printed textile, so fabric is still where it feels most at home. The Unikko Tablecloth 135 x 250 cm is printed in Helsinki on unbleached organic cotton sateen and finished along all its edges. The length suits a long dining table, and the Off-White / Cranberry / Rose colourway keeps the poppies warm without the full intensity of red on white. Because the cloth is unbleached, its colour and surface are naturally lively, and small areas of differing tone can appear. Think of that as part of the material rather than a flaw. It carries an Oeko-Tex certificate.

A tablecloth this graphic does most of the work on its own. Set it with plain white plates and simple glassware and let the print carry the table; adding a second busy pattern on top tends to fight it.

In the bedroom, the Unikko Duvet Cover 150 x 210 cm uses 200 thread count cotton percale, made from 75% organic and 25% recycled cotton. Percale has a crisp, matt hand that suits a print with this much contrast. The cover has hand openings at the top corners, which makes changing it quicker than it sounds. Colourways run from Charcoal / Off-White and White / Red to Blueberry, Sand and Beige variations, so the same 1964 drawing can be bright and familiar or almost tonal. Wash it before first use and separately for the first three washes, and allow for shrinkage of up to 5%.

From print to object: the plate and the tray

The more recent step in Unikko's life is the move off fabric and onto objects, and the two most interesting examples treat the poppy as a shape rather than just a surface decoration.

The Unikko Plate 32 cm is the clearest case. Instead of printing poppies onto a round plate, the stoneware is cut to the outline of a single Unikko bloom, so the petals form the rim. It is made from white stoneware under a brown glaze in Chestnut, which gives the surface a lively, uneven colour, and it measures 32 cm across at 1.27 kg. That is a substantial piece. It works as a serving plate for bread or fruit at the centre of a table, and many people lean it against the back of a dresser or open shelf as decoration between uses. It is food safe, and hand washing is recommended.

The Unikko Tray 46 cm takes the opposite approach. It is a large round tray in laminated birch plywood, made in Sweden from certified birch, with the poppy printed on the face and the reverse left in natural plywood. At 46 cm across it weighs 0.54 kg, light enough to carry fully loaded from kitchen to sofa. The Plum / Cranberry / Off-White / Rose colourway sits comfortably with the tablecloth if you want a matched set, or it can stand alone on a side table as a surface for candles and glasses. Wipe it with a damp cloth or wash by hand, and do not soak it.

Living with a pattern this loud

A print designed to be read across a room behaves differently from a small repeat, and a few habits help it sit well at home.

• One large field per room. A duvet cover or a tablecloth is already a big area of pattern. Pair it with plain textiles and let it be the main event.
• Use colourway to set the volume. Red on white is the loudest version of Unikko. Charcoal, Sand or Off-White / Cranberry / Rose keep the drawing but lower the contrast.
• Mix shape and print. The plate carries the poppy as an outline, the tray and textiles as a printed surface. One of each in a room links them without repeating the same thing twice.
• Treat the objects as decoration between uses. Both the plate and the tray are designed to be left out on a dresser or side table, which suits a pattern that was always meant to be seen.

Sixty years on, Unikko still does what Maija Isola drew it to do: it turns a flower into a confident, graphic shape that holds its own on any scale. See the rest of the range, from bedding to tableware, in the Unikko collection.