Cisterna dei Mille Passi

The Cisterna dei Mille Passi wallpaper comes from an architecture that descends rather than rises: a monumental stepwell, shot in strict frontal symmetry, its flights of stairs mirroring one another as they drop towards a still, bronze-coloured water that closes the composition in depth. On either side, colonnaded galleries stack up for three or four storeys of arcades and slender columns, each level smaller than the last, until they compose the image of an inverted pyramid of stone.

It is the Mughal style that governs this design, in its taste for absolute symmetry, for the module that repeats without ever tiring the eye, for stone worked as though it were precious cloth. Every riser, every tread, every bay of columns answers to a central axis that orders and calms everything: there is no empty margin, only the close geometric weave of steps and arcades filling the eye from one edge of the wall to the other.

What I love in this motif is the double nature of great architecture: legible from a distance as mass and design, yet able to hold, close up, the grain of hand-cut stone, the edge of steps worn by centuries of footsteps, the voussoirs one by one, the mortar joints tracing every course. It is a legacy of rigour and patience that Cisterna dei Mille Passi brings into any room, from the home to the workplace to the most carefully considered hospitality, where I want the wall to tell, by its presence alone, of the same measured quiet held in this stone. Our workshop's weave translates that depth into a surface that accompanies the natural light of any room, without ever shouting.