Emily’s Garden wallpaper
A Wallpaper collaboration with New York jeweller Larkspur & Hawk
Project Type: WALLPAPER COMMISSION
Client: LARKSPUR & HAWK
Location: LARKSPUR & HAWK showroom, Manhattan, New York, USA
Date:Collection launch ~ August 2019
The Project in Brief
When New York jeweller Emily Satloff asked me to design a bespoke wallpaper for her I was intrigued by the prospect of such an unusual cross-over. We were to create an imaginary land for Emily to explore and a menagerie of creatures for her to corral into what has become a capsule collection called “Illustrated”.
Launched August 2019 this beguiling world is now available from LARKSPUR & HAWK as a Home and Fine Jewellery Collection.
Emily first saw my work when she stayed at The Soho Hotel, London and her room was bedecked in my Peacock Garden wallpaper (Zoffany). She knew instantly that she had found someone who spoke her visual language and had a shared appreciation for historical decorative arts with a modern twist.
With the fascinating prospect of a fine jewellery collaboration I joined Emily in a creative, overseas exchange of emails and inspiration. I put together a fantastical land drawing together the Arts & Crafts movement, the Wiener Werkstätte, Indian wall paintings, Tudor embroidery and so much more. Frankly it was an indulgence of shared ideas, a playful process that resulted in a quirky land with a hidden narrative: Creatures seem to have taken over abandoned gardens and citadels, lost jewellery is purloined by birds and once domesticated cats and dogs have returned to the wild.
I painted the design as a square repeat then, once scanned and digitised, we experimented with colour and scale and Emily’s Garden ended up doubled in size and desaturated by 80% for a much softer feel I call “faded opulence”. I then had the design printed, choosing my preferred parchment-y, non-woven paper which maintains the hand painted, mural-like finish. The rolls winged their way over to Emily’s Manhattan showroom where they are now the backdrop to the glamorous world of Larkspur & Hawk.
Meanwhile Emily was already interpreting my paintwork into her new capsule collection and exploring other ways of bringing Emily’s Garden to life. She has developed a range of stationery with 19th century New York stationer Dempsey & Carroll. Utterly charming ceramics were created in the Staffordshire revival style by Andrea Kashanipour including bookends, candlestick holders, and vases. Exquisitely hand-embroidered linen napkins feature botanical elements of the design and I took great pleasure in painting a series of unique jewellery boxes re-purposing antique boxes I sourced in my hometown of Hastings.
All of these pieces appear in the slideshow above and can be purchased via Larkspur & Hawk.
The wallpaper will be available to purchase from directly from me from September 2019 along with Emily’s Garden as a fabric with coordinating designs.
