Elle Decor: Athena Calderone’s Hosting Rules and Tips

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.