Painter and designer Rachel Cope found her place in the world as an artist when she first arrived at RISD. After earning her BFA in Sculpture, she went on to study art therapy at the SVA and has dedicated her life to designing soothing, immersive interior spaces ever since. As creative director and co-founder of Calico Wallpaper, she creates custom-fit, non-repeating wall murals that balance background and foreground, texture, color, and pattern. She also maintains a thriving painting practice and shows her work nationally and internationally. Here she shares her thoughts about life after college and lessons learned at RISD that continue to resonate.

Athena Calderone gets excited about parchment. She’s big on silver leaf, and crazy for etched glass; niches are ongoing fixations, and figured stone is always a yes. In her last kitchen, she worked at a massive, nearly seven-foot-square island of Calacatta Paonazzo marble—ravishing, until she set her sights on something better. Now she has a monolith of dusky red Kinnekulle limestone to keep her company in the kitchen.

“I never thought I would get into hardware design,” she says, glancing from her new countertop over to the burnished-nickel pulls on the double doors leading into her new living room. “But with that and everything else, I just felt like I was going to take this moment to expand myself in ways I’d never dreamed of.”

That’s saying something, because Calderone dreams big. The focus of her latest aspiration is the Manhattan apartment that she and her husband, Victor, a music producer and DJ, bought in 2023. After decades in Brooklyn, most recently in a much-emulated Greek Revival town house (AD, November 2018) where she nurtured a design business and the lifestyle site EyeSwoon, published two books, authored furniture and rug collections, and generally modeled an ideal life, she was ready for a change. (The New York Times titled its article on her move, “What Happens When You Get So Influential That You’re Bored by Your Own Aesthetic?”).

Photography by: William Jess Laird

After successful collaborations with Crate & Barrel and Beni Rugs, design tastemaker Athena Calderone has now tried her hand at wall coverings with Cadence, a collection for Calico Wallpaper. Originally conceived for her Tribeca apartment, the series draws on the patina of aged materials, focusing on the translucent surfaces of natural hides translated into wallpaper. Calderone worked closely with co-founder Rachel Cope and a French decorative painter, layering the artisan’s hand-rendered artwork with high-resolution scans of authentic textures to achieve depth and tonal variation. Fine seam lines run across the surface as a nod to historic paneling, while six colorways, from alabaster and porcelain to oxblood and espresso-toned tobacco, position Cadence as a richly considered addition to the brand’s permanent collection.

Paying homage to decorative traditions, the new Lattice and Mosaic wallpaper collections from Calico were designed in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Francesca DiMattio, the Brooklyn-based talent known for her unique painterly style and ceramic sculptures that are informed by architecture, design, culture and history.

With the Lattice and Mosaic wallpaper collections from Calico, the artist applied her layered approach to create patterns that reinterpret and deconstruct time-honoured traditions into immersive wallcoverings.

Reimagining the delicate floral motifs that adorned 18th-century Sèvres porcelain on a large scale, the Lattice wallpaper is a “sweeping declaration of pattern and femininity with a fierce, confident voice.” To conceive of the design, DiMattio started by sketching the floral motifs found on a dainty teacup and period plates.

Combining soft roses, lilies and forget-me-nots, the Lattice wallpaper pattern expands the namesake trellis design in an almost abstract way, with the flowers framed within differently sized voids. The effect is one that transforms an ornamental accent into a contemporary statement. The Lattice wallpaper from Calico is available in seven colourways: Bleu, Canary, Celadon, Lacquer, Rose, Sage and Turquoise.

Described as a “meditation on memory, material and illusion,” the Mosaic wallpaper features a pattern that applies a modern lens to ancient surfaces. Beginning with a series of hand-painted florals, DiMattio softened the effect with a wash of paint that symbolizes the erosion of time.

Set on a loosely-painted grid, which lends the wallpaper the look of aged tile, complete with faux grout lines, Mosaic from Calico positions vignettes of animals, blossoms and fragments of the natural world in the foreground. The Mosaic wallpaper is available in seven colourways: Fresco, Gild, Lazuli, Tarnish, Terrene, Tessera and Vestige.

Both the Lattice and Mosaic wallpaper from Calico are printed on clay-coated paper and are suitable for application in residential and commercial settings.

Every December, collectors and creatives set their sights on South Florida and Design Miami, which marks its 21st iteration under the theme “Make. Believe.” Curatorial director Glenn Adamson frames it as a meditation on how the avant-garde has shaped our environment across the ages—a fitting concept for a city that thrives on reinvention.

Artist Francesca DiMattio reinterprets 18th-century Sèvres porcelain and aged frescoes as painterly murals for a new assortment of wallpaper with Calico. The brand’s advanced printing techniques magnify her hand-sketched floral and architectural motifs into sweeping panoramas that feel at once decorative and deconstructed

No longer content to fade into the background, today’s surfacing materials are stepping into the spotlight. The season’s standout introductions are being asked to do more, transforming simple finishes into dynamic canvases that channel the spirit of faraway landscapes, reimagine timeworn materials and advance sustainability. Below, we’ve rounded up five collections that exemplify how foundational surfaces — from walls to floors and furnishings — can become expressive, high-performance elements that balance material innovation with visual storytelling.

This subtle, poetic wallpaper collection from Calico gets the seal of approval from interior designer Athena Calderone. In fact, she designed Cadence, her debut wallcoverings collection, for her own Tribeca apartment. Inspired by the “subtle beauty of aged materials — particularly the fine, translucent textures found in natural hides,” the collection feels both timeworn and contemporary, embodying her timeless, minimalist style. “Design, for me, is at its most powerful when it acknowledges history while nodding to the future,” notes Calderone. “The silhouettes, materials and gestures of earlier eras offer a language that, when reinterpreted — as with the Cadence wallpaper — becomes the foundation for something entirely new. I love to view the modern world through this nostalgic lens.”

Working closely with a French artisan, Calderone layered hand-painted artwork with hi-res scans of authentic textures to create the final result, which is offered in a range of six earthy colourways: light neutrals like Alabaster, Fawn and Porcelain, as well as richer hues like Jasper, a deep forest green, Oxblood, a deep red, and Tobacco, a warm brown.

Calico Wallpaper introduces Cadence, a new collection created with Athena Calderone in her first foray into wallpaper design. Originally conceived for Calderone’s forthcoming Tribeca home, the pattern draws from the quiet beauty of aged materials, combining hand-rendered artwork by a French artisan with layered scans of natural textures. Offered in six nuanced colorways—from whisper-soft alabaster to deep oxblood and tobacco—Cadence reads as both tactile and restrained, bringing Calderone’s refined sense of materiality to the wall in a way that feels timeless and deeply atmospheric.

There’s a new relaxed mood taking hold in interiors. Cupboards are curved, colour palettes are grounded and patchwork — homespun or otherwise — is making a comeback. Elsewhere, fun is being had with bespoke embroidery on pieces that tell stories about their owners. Read on for the hottest home trends to try this year and beyond.

This week, Athena Calderone, the designer, James Beard Award-winning author, and founder of Studio Athena Calderone and EyeSwoon, gathered friends at her new Atelier to celebrate her first wallpaper collection. Cadence, designed in collaboration with Brooklyn-based Calico Wallpaper, was born from a personal source: the designer’s forthcoming Tribeca apartment, where she became fascinated by the soft, translucent textures of aged parchment and natural hides.

Working alongside Rachel Cope, co-founder and creative director of Calico Wallpaper, Calderone enlisted a French artisan to hand-render delicate layers that, when digitized and overlaid with authentic material scans, became something that feels both ancient and startlingly new.

“Design, for me, is at its most powerful when it honors history while acknowledging the future,” Calderone says. “I love to view the modern world through this nostalgic lens.”

The result is a collection of six colors—Alabaster, Fawn, Jasper, Oxblood, Porcelain, and Tobacco—that reimagine walls as softly glowing surfaces. At the celebratory dinner, the wallpaper made its formal debut featured on the dining table, a fitting introduction for a designer who believes beauty and history should always be in conversation.

Here, Calderone shares her rules for hosting, from the importance of dimmed lighting to why water pitchers matter more than you think.

Calico Wallpaper expands its artistic universe with Lattice and Mosaic, two new decorative wallcovering collections created with multidisciplinary artist Francesca DiMattio. Known for her layered, sculptural approach to ceramics, DiMattio turns two historic craft traditions into immersive, room-defining surfaces that feel both painterly and subversive. Lattice scales up the dainty florals of 18th-century Sèvres porcelain into a bold, feminine gesture, while Mosaic reimagines ancient tiled surfaces through washes of pigment, faux grout lines, and glimpses of flora and fauna, a meditation on erosion, illusion, and time.

Together, the collections honor craft while challenging its politeness, giving the decorative a contemporary edge. As DiMattio explains, “I wanted ornament to feel powerful and alive.” The collaboration reinforces Calico Wallpaper’s ongoing mission to merge art, design, and atmosphere—inviting us to inhabit pattern rather than simply decorate with it. Lattice and Mosaic are available in seven colorways each.