Photography by Nick Hughes/Yellowtrace

For design couple Nick and Rachel Cope, wallpaper is never just wallpaper. In their hands, ancient decorative techniques and modern-day technology are melded together in radical ways to create hypnotic, ethereal environments. ‘What interests us is that wallpaper can make a space feel immersive, or it can be like a piece of art on the wall,’ says Rachel of the founding principle behind Calico Wallpaper, the company she and her husband launched five years ago out of their apartment in Brooklyn…

Calico Wallpaper

The folks at Brooklyn-based Calico Wallpaper were way out ahead of the trend towards marble wallpaper, and their designs are still some of my favorites. Their original collection includes the marbelized paper pictured above, and their Inverted Spaces Collection, featured in a couple of the rooms in the slideshow up top, has swirly, gold-and-silver touched patterns that resemble stone but also conjure up images of the heavens. These are also murals, available in custom sizes.

Wabi Cloud; Inverted Spaces Andromeda, Orion; and Lunaris Midnight are shown above.

Calico Wallpaper is excited to announce that our Satori Collection has been chosen by the jury of the Architizer A+ Awards as the winner of the Finishes- Wall Coverings & Ceilings category.

We may have already named our favorite 10 installations seen during Milan Design Week 2017, but in reality, that list could easily have been 20 (or 30) as there were feasts for the eyes just about everywhere we looked. Today, we showcase the rest of the best spotted in the various design districts, historic sites, and the Milano fairgrounds, home of Salone del Mobile.

Calico Wallpaper
The wallpaper concern’s new collaborations were installed exhibit-style in a gallery space of the Brera district. The biggest standout? In our opinion, it was Snarkitecture‘s Topographies, which looks like a three-dimensional torn-paper composition from afar but up close, is actually a two-dimensional pixelated wall covering.

Topographies Winter; Microcosmos Umbra & Plume are shown above.

According to Toogood, it was her somewhat isolated childhood in picturesque Rutland County, in the English countryside – where she spent the majority of her time outdoors – that ignited her imagination… This month, Toogood’s studio is launching several projects during Milan’s annual Salone del Mobile furniture fair. Among them are a handcrafted rug collection for CC-Tapis, a fiberglass and aluminum lighting range for Matter and a series of wall coverings for Calico Wallpaper.

Two of her introductions – the wallpaper she designed with Calico and the handmade quilts she stitched for Once Milano (they’re hanging in BDDW) – reflect one of Toogood’s most personal interests: painting. “There is a freedom in this way of working, by hand painting, and I enjoy that very direct sense of craft, without any technology,” she says. For both projects she worked directly on canvas, building up images through appliqué on the quilts, and then encasing a room in her brushstroke renditions of the English countryside, for Calico. “I felt it quite wonderful to literally bring the countryside inside.”

Woodlands, Fields, Moors in Fields is shown above.

Calico Wallpaper’s exhibition “Imagined Landscape” offers a series of wall murals by cutting-edge designers, like BCXSY’s delicate Microcosmos, Ana Kraš’s Mira & Miloš Collection, Snarkitecture’s Topographies Collection, and the whimsical Woodlands, Fields, Moors Collection by Faye Toogood, the British designer whose work seems to be all over Milan this year.

Woodlands, Fields, Moors Fields is shown above.

Calico Walpaper’s new launches this year includes Snarkitecture’s architectural torn paper wall covering… and a bucolic scene by Faye Toogood.

…In the confines of Rosanna Orlandi’s creative sanctuary, Sé has styled an apartment furnished top to toe with its products. The space includes fabrics by Dedar, and a new design by BCXSY for Calico Wallpaper.

Mira, Roze; Woodlands, Fields, Moors Fields; and Microcosmos Plume are shown above.

Some subjects in art never cease to be reinterpreted. One such everlasting muse? The landscape. For Brooklyn-based Calico Wallpaper’s Imagined Landscape presentation in Milan’s Brera Design District this week – their first ever stand-alone exhibition for Milan Design Week – the husband-and-wife duo asked four of their favorite creatives to turn their personalized riffs on landscapes into digitally printed wallpapers…

Microcosmos Umbra, Plume; Topographies Winter; Microcosmos Crest; and Fields, Woodlands, Moors Fields are shown above.

Aurora Ray is featured in the article “Destination: Los Angeles” in Surface Magazine’s Online March 2017 issue

Megan Hopp, an interior designer with Homepolish, used abstract custom wallpaper with a cosmic theme in lavender and silver to enliven a small, plain bedroom in an East Village apartment she decorated for a client last year… The print, a metallic wash from Calico Wallpaper’s Inverted Spaces collection, takes up two walls in the bedroom and cost about $4,000. “It was a big price tag, but we all agreed that it really is a work of art on its own,” Ms. Hopp said. “We kept every other piece really neutral – no pattern, no color, nothing, an absolutely clean canvas – so as to let this glorious paper do its thing.”

Inverted Spaces Andromeda is shown above

‘When you are working with a view this gobsmacking, there is no reason to even try to upstage them, it isn’t possible,’ Behun says. Still, the interior designer did not shy away from lavish accents; gold accessories by Tom Dixon and New York studio Apparatus glisten in the apartment’s natural light, while Calico’s embellished ‘Satori’ drip wallpaper has been realised in a striking bespoke blue…

Satori in a custom color way and substrate is shown above

In one of Tribeca’s most iconic buildings, Los Angeles firm Consort eschews the traditional masculine retreat in favor of a sophisticated, expectedly bold living space.

Aurora Peat is shown above

Brooklyn-based Calico wallpaper devised a bright blue mural for another bedroom. “We wanted one room that had some very rich color, and so we worked with Calico on this paper, which is based on Japanese shibori technique,” says Behun.

Custom color Satori in a custom substrate is shown above.

Aurora Ray and Cirrus Vapor are shown above

Eschewing traditional retail venues, company founder David Alhadeff established his new L.A. outpost in a private residence in the hills above West Hollywood… Open by appointment only, Casa Perfect beckons visitors with the promise of a more intimate interaction with the company’s wide-ranging collections… Casa Perfect’s inaugural installation features a variety of product introductions dispersed throughout the four-bedroom home and its patios and gardens.

Aurora Ray and Cirrus Vapor are shown above

Everyone from actor Neil Patrick Harris to Mast Chocolates has fallen under the spell of Calico Wallpaper’s evocative designs…

Wabi Bone (0:10; 1:47; 2:23) & River (0:45); Aurora Ray (0:55); Cirrus Veil (1:10); Night Aubergine (2:20) are shown in the video above

Chocolate may no longer fill the inside of 325 West Broadway, the former site of a brick chocolate factory in New York’s SoHo district, but its name, XOCO (the Catalan word for ‘chocolate’) 325, keeps the building’s legacy alive. DDG took over the building in 2012, transforming it into a 21-unit residential property in the heart of one of Manhattan’s chic-est neighborhoods…

Photography by Robert Granoff

Aurora Ray is shown above