Arcata Solare

The Arcata Solare wallpaper opens a single great passage on the wall: a colossal arch that springs from the two lower corners and rises to a rounded apex, filling the whole height and width of the field. It belongs to the Arches style, here set out as a sequence of concentric bands that narrow step by step towards the opening, like voussoirs reduced to flat, clean strips. Outside the arch, two corner triangles close the composition; inside, an even open field lets the eye breathe.

The colour tells of a slow descent: from the burnt umber of the outermost band, through terracottas and ochres, to the last band the colour of travertine, laid on a warm ivory ground. Every band is a flat field, separated from the next by a thin dark outline, and close up the bands prove precise, calibrated, slightly narrower or wider as they follow the curve upwards.

For me an arch is not only an architectural boundary: it is the form that we chose to mark a passage, to say that beyond that threshold something changes. In this Arcata Solare wallpaper the arch is taken to the extreme of its essence — no superfluous ornament, only the pure geometry of passage, made monumental and legible from any distance. It is a threshold that leads nowhere else: it stays, still, to the measure of the wall, ready to receive the space around it.

In the WallZad workshop every band is calibrated by hand, colour upon colour, so that the sequence of rings keeps the exactness that makes it precious both from afar and close up, for every interior that chooses to pass through it.