Bifora di Granada

The Bifora di Granada wallpaper comes from an image I wanted to leave untouched: two tall horseshoe arches, twins and perfectly symmetrical, joined at the centre by a slender colonnette crowned with a small muqarnas capital. Above the springing line of the arches opens a wide panel of pierced stucco, where eight-pointed stars and polygons interlock until they form a lace of stone suspended over the shadow.

It belongs to the Moorish style, the one that taught Mediterranean architecture the discipline of geometry as a form of silent prayer: repetition does not tire, it calms. The arches stay smooth and quiet, letting the eye rest before leading it, inevitably, towards the fine tangle of the openwork above. The palette moves in a warm range of lime and sand — ivory, pale ochre, the grey-blue of the shadow gathering in the carvings, the colonnette a little more golden than the rest.

To look at it from a distance is to read a whole architecture in a single gesture; to look at it close up is to discover the clean edge of every piercing, the slight cracks in the plaster, the ring of moulding that girds the column. It is a passage, not an ornament: the threshold between full light and the half-light within, between solid and the void that defines it.

In our Italian workshop we return this threshold with the same care with which it was carved: every shade of lime, every cut in the stucco, finds in the Bifora di Granada wallpaper the same luminous density as the original, ready to inhabit any room with the sobriety of an architecture that has no need to raise its voice.