Greto Colonnare

I come into being as Greto Colonnare wallpaper from a river bed that the water polished until it revealed its innermost frame. I belong to columnar basalt eroded by the cataract, the style nature itself carved over millennia, when the current ran over columns of volcanic rock until their hexagonal tops emerged, flattened and glossy, like a natural floor.

The design shows exactly this: a river bed of levelled columnar basalt, where the hexagonal and near-hexagonal heads of the columns sit side by side without a break, forming an irregular honeycomb in which now and then a five- or seven-sided cell breaks the regularity. There is no focal point: the eye reads the whole surface as a single continuous plane, in deep charcoal and graphite black, cooled by slate reflections in the polished centres, while the joints between the columns lighten to ash grey and fine ochre-rust veins trace the memory of the water that passed over them.

Close up, the polish reveals a crystalline dust, concentric cooling rings, fine fractures radiating from the centre of every column: a skin of stone that tells of time and pressure. To dress a wall with Greto Colonnare wallpaper means bringing home this mineral quiet, the same attention that in the WallZad workshop guides every texture, every tone, every detail reproduced with an almost geological fidelity.