Vello d’Altura

I sign the Vello d’Altura wallpaper the way one strokes a rare material: with respect. It belongs to the great family of Mammals, and carries its most intimate secret — not the shape of the animal, but its skin seen close to, the vicuña fleece in its purest weave.

I have depicted very fine cinnamon-coloured fibres, combed into soft parallel furrows running diagonally, each crest a compact ridge of hair following the direction of its neighbour, without a break: a single field, never a repeated module. The light settles on it as it would on the living back of the animal — brighter on the crests, where the biscuit and ivory catch the glow, deeper in the furrows, where the chestnut gathers in shadow. Up close one discovers the single filaments, their slight crimp, the odd unruly hair breaking the order: details that bring life to a surface otherwise merely elegant.

It is a drawing that speaks of shelter, of animal warmth turned into domestic geometry, of a nature that lets itself be looked at without clamour. In any interior — a home, an office, a hotel lobby — it remains a sober gesture, able to fill an entire wall with the same quiet with which a fleece fills the hands.

At WallZad every fibre was studied at length before becoming a surface: the wallpaper is born of that attention, because luxury, for us, is above all precision in looking.