(b 1838; d ?London, 1913). English architect and designer. He studied under the architect James Kellaway Colling (c. 1815–1905), an expert on Gothic architecture, and spent several years as assistant to Matthew Digby Wyatt, who at the time was working on the then India Office (1867–8), Whitehall, London. Davis was a designer of architectural ornament, furniture, wallpaper, textiles, ironwork and ceramics, and in 1870 some of his designs were published in Building News. For James Shoolbred & Co., London ( fl 1870–1900s), he designed furniture in the medieval, Jacobean, Stuart, Louis XVI and Japanese styles and in the style of Robert Adam and James Adam, illustrated in the company’s catalogue Designs of Furniture ... and Interior Decoration (1876). A selection of furniture designed by Davis and manufactured by Shoolbred was shown at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. In 1885 he published Art and Work, which contains 85 lithographic plates of ornament for marble, stone and terracotta and designs for furniture, ceramics, metalwork and textiles, accompanied by notes on the design sources; among the plates are several after drawings, previously unpublished, by the Adam brothers. In his wallpaper designs of the 1880s and 1890s for Jeffrey & Co. and Woollams & Co., Davis added Arts and Crafts to his range of styles. His ‘Rydal’ wallpaper (1886) for Woollams, with its crisp, vigorously scrolled plant forms, was among several patterns that resemble those of William Morris. In ‘King’s College’, his best-known design, he adapted 17th-century strapwork and motifs in an elaborate wallpaper featuring deep borders. Davis is noted for his ability to work in a plurality of styles, executed in a rich yet disciplined manner.