Wall&decò. 15 years and a virtual museum

WeMU

WeMU, Level 1 - WET System

Designing the world through surfaces: not just with images and wallpaper patterns but also with wall coverings. Ripe for online discovery.

Wall&decò’s trajectory has been short but powerful. Set up “only” 15 years ago on an intuition by Christian Benini, then a advertising photographer, the company has revolutionised the way wallpaper is conceived and designed. The aim was to bring the art of decoration to an entire wall at a time when absolute minimalism reigned where wall surfaces and furnishings were concerned. They began by interpreting the vertical confines of spaces as empty canvases, ripe for filling with oversized and tactile drawings, fantasy designs, patterns and creativity. Not long afterwards, the idea of images as scenic backdrops to “light up” the domestic spaces caught on amongst architects and designers, who saw them as ideal solutions for finishing off stylish interiors, integrating them perfectly with the rest of the furnishings, given that customisation was one of the avenues that the brand tackled from the outset.

WeMU

WeMU, Level 2 - OUT System

Wallpaper thus turned into a actual project. Over the years, Wall&decò has brought in creatives from across the globe, along with more traditional architects and designers as well as stylists, illustrators and artists, periodically adding assorted forms and concepts of great aesthetic and emotional impact to the catalogue. What all the options in the catalogue have in common is great power of expression and sensory engagement. They presented their debut collection Contemporary Wallpaper in 2005, followed the next year by their first vinyl-backed paper, moving on to increasingly innovative solutions also from a technical and performance point of view. Out System™ is a wallcovering for outside walls and façades, while Wet System™ is a wallcovering for damp areas such as bath and shower rooms, and an example of how the brand harnesses its DNA in the name of design. Thanks to waterproof substrates and dedicated systems for outside walls and façades, Wall&decò’s wallpapers echo the new modes of living and the renewed tastes in decor in residential and contract spaces. In 2018 the company became part of the Swedish group Wallvision – already operating in the traditional wallpaper market in Northern Europe, the US and China – opening up interesting international development opportunities. As a result of the know-how available to the brand following its acquisition, in January 2020 it came up with a new ecological support, produced in the Swedish factories and responding to the steadily growing market and environmental demands for sustainability. CWC-ECO is a non-woven fabric covered with cellulose fibre and polyester, produced using an ecological and completely recyclable process. It is an example of how even wallpaper is becoming part of a virtuous process that does not end once it is applied to a wall, but actually begins right then and continues every time it’s recycled, until it is disposed of.

WeMU

WeMU, Level 3 - WET System

Wall&decò chose to mark its 15th anniversary by building WeMU, a new, innovative and strictly virtual showroom. It is an architecturally realistic digital museum that conserves the brand collections on various different levels. On entering you are treated to a proper museum visit, and can pause in front of each of the graphics on display to appreciate the content and enjoy the audio contributions, making for a thoroughly original storytelling experience. There are three different levels. The Wet System collections, all in black and white, are “narrated” on the first. This pair of opposing shades, which has always been synonymous with elegance and sophistication, becomes a metaphor for the sense of voids and solids. A palette of non-colours, created by light, which itself becomes a colour and a material for indicating precision, peremptoriness, and ineluctability. The second level is devoted to outdoor wallpapers, which represent a reinterpretation of outside spaces through new aesthetic codes which, for their part, ensure highly impactful visual solutions while maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the urban landscape into which they are inserted. Finally, the third level showcases a reinterpretation of one of the protagonist mood boards of the Contemporary Wallpaper 2020 collection with new chromatic meanings – on one hand there are the daylight colours, in which the orange of the earth meets sage green - and on the other there are the more nocturnal colours and atmospheres: red grows darker, beige is extinguished, green becomes strong and rich. Day and night are the protagonists of the same journey.

www.wallanddeco.com/
www.wallanddeco.com/en-us/wemu

 

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