Rosa di Hillier

The Rosa di Hillier wallpaper comes from an observation that seems impossible and yet exists: a lake the colour of sugared almonds, closed at the horizon by a strip of woodland, beyond which the deep blue ocean opens. It belongs to the genre of lakes and rivers, that landscape painting which takes water as its subject and light as its narrative matter.

The design is composed in three horizontal bands, crisp and never overlapping: at the top the candy-pink basin of Lake Hillier, with its margins of white salt encrusted along the nearer shore; in the middle a continuous dark strip of eucalyptus and coastal shrubs, separating the two waters like a living border; below, the cobalt sea turning navy as it nears the pale horizon. Every band holds a chromatic breath of its own — pink, salmon and dusty rose on the saline water; bottle green and olive among the canopies; saturated blue catching light in the distance — and every treetop, every ripple, stays legible down to the smallest detail.

It is a landscape that speaks of thresholds: two worlds set side by side, distinct, and yet able to share the same horizon. I like to think of it as a lesson in measure applied to the wall, where the boldest colour finds its natural limit not in restraint but in the nearness of what is different from itself.

In our workshop the Rosa di Hillier wallpaper is printed at very high definition, to give back from a distance the power of the image and, close up, the whole weave of the landscape: salt, leaves, waves, in a single continuous scene without repeats.