Have you looked at patterns on public seating wherever there's fabric? Or e.g. hotel carpets and the like? Consider the heavily patterned designs often serve a

Have you looked at patterns on public seating wherever there's fabric? Or e.g. hotel carpets and the like? Consider the heavily patterned designs often serve a function. You can regularly clean well enough to address health and safety and still end up with plenty of marks that are high effort to remove that only really affect appearance, and so designs that reduce the visual impact have been used in high traffic spaces pretty much "forever" as a means to reduce the need for high effort cleaning. Not really much difference for a wall.