Architectural Digest: AD’s Discoveries of the Month

Lee Broom has always had a thing for drapery. As a child actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the British designer became enchanted with the set dressings. As a side hustle during his fashion-school years at Central Saint Martins he created moody, curtained environments for local bars and London raves. And as an intern for Vivienne Westwood, he observed how the late style icon studied the paintings of Anthony van Dyck to inform her cascading couture. “Things like that stick with me even now,” notes Broom, who eventually made the professional leap to product design when he established his firm in 2007. It all serves as the creative backbone to Overture, a collaboration with Calico Wallpaper that harnesses Trompe L’Oeil, a technique dating back to Roman and Greek empires, to create illusory, two-dimensional swags. “Up close you can see the brushstrokes,” Calico cofounder Rachel Cope explains of the pattern, first painted after physical models and then printed on paper. “Many layers of oil paint with glazing gives it this beautiful textured surface.” That impressionistic execution grounds the surreal motif, available in seven colorways. Each teems with passion, camp, and obsessive detail—all things we might expect from a theater kid. When asked if he still considers himself one, Broom laughs and replies, “Weirdly, no.” But those feelings all come back when he takes in an opera or play. When the curtain rises, he says, “I still get that rush of blood to the head.”