Wallpaper*: Designers react to the wild side of nature inside an Austrian castle

Over the weekend, Alice Stori Liechtenstein inaugurated the latest edition of her ongoing design exhibition and residency, a project set against the dramatic backdrop of her Austrian castle, Schloss Hollenegg. Titled Walden, this year’s theme invited designers to think about bringing nature back into everyday life. But not the romantic version of it, as Liechtenstein explains, the gritty, wild kind.

‘I want to address the environmental crisis,’ says Stori Liechtenstein, the castle’s resident and curator. ‘In the past 18 months there have been some groundbreaking exhibitions on design and ecology, and I felt it was necessary to keep the conversation alive and explore it further. I find a lot of the current narrative is unnecessarily politicised and guilt-inducing, so I wanted to talk more about nature than the damage we are doing to it, in the hope of reawakening our innate love for the earth.’

Calico Wallpaper collaborated with Charlap Hyman & Herrero to produce a collection from this installation titled Overgrow. The collection has various colorways, including Alice, named after the curator of the show, and is the colorway currently installed at Schloss Hollenegg.