Evoking the beauty of Japanese artistry with large-scale, immersive wallcoverings

Large wallcoverings featuring a uniform surface can frequently look flat, lifeless and soulless. But in the flourishing, ever-expanding world of wallcoverings, as architects and interior designers fully appreciate, subtly textured wallcoverings offer an inspiring alternative to this. After all, they inject warmth and character into spaces, be these residential or commercial. Such textures are often made of natural materials or convincingly simulate them. Fortuitously, this appeals to designers for another reason: a palette of predominantly neutral tones helps to create refined, harmonious interiors.

Another attraction of large-scale wallcoverings is their potential to transport people to entirely different environments and settings, depending on the scenes and motifs depicted on them. A wall-to-wall panorama can certainly achieve this, as does another style of wallcovering today, namely a self-contained, composite design combining pictorial and non-pictorial elements.

Italian brand Glamora specialises in large-scale wallcoverings that appeal both for bringing warmth to interiors and for having a transportative effect. Its collections centre on specific themes relating to culture, music, art, design or nature that free people’s imaginations in the process. These feature figurative, abstract or semi-abstract imagery or a mix of all three, as is the case with its new Madama Butterfly Collection, a homage to Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera, set in Nagasaki, Japan.

The collection comprises five subjects, the word subject being Glamora’s term for a rectangular composite wallcovering that contains a pre-determined mix of illustrated and non-illustrated elements (the former refers to a figurative or more abstract image, the latter to a plain material). These subjects contain a minimum of three different materials and a maximum of six. A super-fine, brushed-gold effect metal profile elegantly delineates each element within the subject.

All five subjects are 300 cm high but each has a different width, the widest measuring 445 cm. Despite each subject being of a fixed size, the collection is intended to give designers creative freedom to combine several subjects as they so wish. While the subjects can be attached to walls singly, it’s equally possible to place two or more next to one another in a horizontal formation or above one another for a vertical, taller configuration.

The subjects are made of up to six materials with a natural feel. Each material has a slightly different texture, rendering the collection yet more varied, subtle and refined. These comprise GlamBirch, a lightweight sheet of birch that highlights the warmth of wood, GlamRafia – woven sisal fibres whose irregular, dense surface catches the light in a multitude of ways and overall has a subtle sheen – GlamCork, made of bleached cork, the velvety GlamVelour, GlamPure, a non-woven fabric made of pure linen and viscose, and GlamSatin, a viscose with an iridescent finish evocative of the sheen on silk.

The choice of opera for the new collection chimes perfectly with Glamora’s DNA since the brand is known for celebrating the cultured and beautiful. ‘Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and our eponymous collection reflect our brand’s core values,’ says a company spokesperson. ‘Glamora promotes culture in conjunction with an Italian desire to create beauty by interweaving innovation and art. The Madama Butterfly Collection synthesises both.’

Like the iconic opera, the collection fuses Western and Far Eastern culture and aesthetics. The fascinating image of the geisha, Madama Butterfly, also known as Cio-Cio San – who enigmatically glides through Nagasaki’s streets in sumptuously patterned kimonos – was a key reference point behind the collection as a whole.

Nature inspired some of the illustrated elements, notably slender silhouettes of bamboo or reeds, luxuriant leaves and misty circles suggestive of moons. Other illustrated elements feature washes of ink that call to mind Japanese art and calligraphy. Overall, these illustrated elements have an impressionistic, evanescent quality that mirrors Madama Butterfly’s elusive and mysterious image.

The rectangular forms of the subjects take inspiration from Japanese architecture, says Glamora’s spokesperson: ‘A key idea for us was imagining a delicate figure, an impalpable geisha, such as Madama Butterfly, walking behind the fusama and shoji – the Japanese words for sliding screens and doors – of a traditional Japanese machiya house.’

Each subject in Glamora’s Madama Butterfly Collection is unique, arousing different moods and emotions, just like Puccini’s opera. When subjects are placed next to or above each other these intensify their presence although, whatever their configuration, the resulting effect is unfailingly calming and harmonious.

© Architonic

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