Trine di Garofano

I call this design the Trine di Garofano wallpaper, and it belongs to the great story of Flora, the family of botanical subjects to which Italian decorative art has always returned with devotion. The subject here is precise and recognisable: carnations, Dianthus caryophyllus, corollas dense with slender petals whose margins are fringed and serrated like hand-worked lace, flanked by lanceolate leaves that embrace short jointed stems. The flowers alternate in a medium-scale interlace, bud and leaf fitting edge to edge until they form a continuous lattice, without pause or gap, on a warm ivory ground that takes in antique pink, terracotta and soft coral beside the sage green of the leaves.

There is, in this dense plant weave, the same patience one gives to embroidery: every fringed petal speaks of minute care, a detail revealed only at close range, while from a distance the whole dissolves into a soft, vibrant fabric. It is a flower of childhood gardens and bourgeois drawing rooms at once, able to return a domestic warmth to the wall without ever falling into decoration for its own sake.

In composing the Trine di Garofano wallpaper I followed the method that is WallZad’s signature: crisp hand-drawn outlines, measured colours laid down without superfluous shading, a repeat studied so that the motif runs invisibly from one edge of the wall to the other. The result is a continuous floral carpet, made to stay long in the eyes of those who live in the space, in every room of the home as in places of hospitality.