Expanding horizons: Glamora

Even ardent minimalists can’t deny that wallcoverings featuring arresting floor-to-ceiling motifs inject character into a space. Arguably, they also make a room look bigger: patterns and broad-brush painterly effects draw our eyes ceilingwards, creating an illusion of greater height, while rich tonal variations provide atmosphere.

Founded 10 years ago, Modena-based company Glamora has since gradually expanded and refined its portfolio of bespoke wallcoverings with large-scale patterns or panoramic designs. Its showroom in Milan’s design-conscious Brera district boasts soaring ceilings – ideal for showcasing its expansive designs. These range from hazy, impressionistic landscapes to geometric compositions redolent of 20th-century Constructivist art. Glamora’s in-house design team meticulously researches materials, finishes and colours, so that each design can be ordered in any number of permutations. Although all-enveloping, the wallcoverings are not overpowering as they come in subtle hues.

As hard-wearing as they are decorative, they can also be wrapped round wardrobes and doors to create seamless, homogeneous surfaces, and are suitable for domestic and commercial projects.

When designer Delisa Merli converted a compact apartment in Bologna into a stylish guesthouse, she capitalised on Glamora’s malleable, robust wallcoverings. ‘A key consideration with any project is choosing the right surfaces,’ she notes. She chose romantic designs that paid homage to Italy and its rich architectural heritage - and created an illusion of more space. She covered the walls of a bedroom and ensuite bathroom with the wallcovering Zen – an ethereal design comprising delicate branches hanging in front of a full moon, which unified the spaces. She also lined both sides of the interconnecting door with the same design – recto verso - to create a seamless surface and make a decorative feature of the door.

Merli also plumped for Domus – a design bearing a trompe l’oeil photographic image of a museum interior picturing an enfilade of arched spaces disappearing into the distance, a nod, too, to Bologna’s iconic colonnades. By exploiting a perspectival effect, she made the apartment look larger still. Finally Merli lined doors and cupboards in the hallway with Glamora’s faux-marble wallcovering Bardiglio.

The apartment is in a luxury 1960s apartment block. To be consistent with this aesthetic, Merli furnished this chic but comfortable flat with several architect-designed pieces of Italian and Scandinavian mid-century design – her homage, too, to the new, more relaxed lifestyle of the postwar era: ‘Great architects working in the late 1950s radically changed the way we lived at home.’


© Architonic