Ghirlanda di Deruta

I sign the Ghirlanda di Deruta wallpaper the way one signs an inheritance: with the light hand of someone who knows that beauty, when it is real, has no need to raise its voice. I belong to the maiolica style, that painting on enamel which for centuries decorated plates and jugs in Umbrian workshops, and which here loosens into a continuous design: festoons of grapes, figs, pears and oak and laurel leaves, hung in garlands that chase one another between eight-petalled rosettes, round anchors that mark the rhythm at regular intervals.

Every shape is full and clean, with no superfluous gradation: inside the outlines, dense hatched lines draw the veins of the leaves and the flesh of the fruit, like an engraving breathing beneath the enamel. Maiolica blue and warm ochre settle on an ivory ground, with terracotta accents that light the fruit without ever shouting. It is a motif born of the table and the garden, of the generosity of the autumn harvest turned into perpetual ornament, able to wrap a whole wall without a break.

In drawing it I thought of the houses where the light changes but the wall stays a fixed point, of workplaces and hospitality spaces where a single large wall can tell a whole story. The Ghirlanda di Deruta wallpaper does not furnish: it converses, with the calm of someone who has learned that worth is measured in care for detail, the same care WallZad gives to every roll, from the choice of colours to the final hanging.