Smalto di Felce

The Smalto di Felce wallpaper is born of an old gesture — glazed ceramic — where every curled fern frond becomes a medallion, a circular memory of an English garden caught at its most secret moment: the shoot not yet open, the spiral that holds the growth to come.

I wanted to hold that moment of botanical suspension — the crosier of the fern — and give it back with the precision of poured glaze: celadon and fern green settle on the ribs of the frond, lifted by cream reflections where the glaze gathers and thins, as it truly does in the firing of stoneware. Each medallion is a small round world, repeated with rigour on a ground of lime and stone, in a grid that knows no interruption: the motifs run to the edges and beyond, with no visible seam, like tiling that wraps the whole room.

It is a design made for the bathroom, where the diffused daylight strokes the walls without hard shadow: here the wallpaper becomes an almost ceramic surface, cool to the mind before it is cool to the touch, in natural dialogue with the spa calm these rooms look for. From a distance the medallions compose an architectural order, almost a facing of old maiolica; close up you find the small choreography of the spiral, the way the glaze thickens and thins.

In this passage from the large gesture to the smallest detail I recognise the method WallZad brings to every project: a study of colour and texture carried out with a ceramicist's care, for a made-to-measure hanging that gives back, in every room, the same controlled quiet.