American Design Hot List

Calico Wallpaper

New York, calicowallpaper.com
With their killer aesthetic, their savvy design-world collaborations, and their mix of digital know-how and time-honored fine-art techniques, the husband-and-wife duo of Nick Cope and Rachel Mosler have, improbably, made wallpaper cool again.

What is American design to you, and what excites you about it?
American design is undergoing an amazing time of dynamism and change. Let’s talk about the designers themselves: Every month it seems that the American design landscape is being reconfigured by bright new studios opening their doors and sharing their aesthetic vision with the world. Small teams or individuals are trailblazing down the design path and imaging their own systems to develop, refine, produce, deliver, and service their work. We would even dare to say that new American designers are working with great courage because of the great leap of faith that’s required to believe in your work and have the ability to bring it to market. Perhaps the pioneering spirit that America is known for has taken hold of the design scene.

What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?
When we wrapped up design week in New York last year, we thought that we were out of steam and had planned to regroup and start early on collections for 2016. But that’s just when things began to get interesting, and we realized that our year was not over! We showed our new Inverted Spaces collection at “Precious,” an exhibition curated by French designer Elizabeth Leriche at Maison & Objet in Paris. We were also in a private exhibition there for the celebrated French silversmith Christofle, where we unveiled a massive amount of contrasting Aurora gradients in two salons alongside work by Tomas Libertiny. During the London Design Festival, we showed at Design House by Mallett Antiques, which was celebrating its 150-year anniversary. Now we have time to fully focus on wrapping up a new collection to launch during New York Design Week, as well as a very special collaboration that we can’t disclose just yet.

What inspires your work in general?
Our work is inspired by creating a mood and an experience. The goal at Calico Wallpaper is to immerse the viewer in pattern and to leave an emotional impact. We feel that it’s important to create something that’s not only aesthetically pleasing, but visceral, or else the work sits only on the surface. Design work should linger and strive to be timeless. We also feel that wallpaper has long been relegated to the background and our mission is to make it a feature and a conversation. The fact that our studio explores only custom non-repeating work allows us to make specialized installations that are tailored to the architecture and client in color or form. We like this flexibility and complete control. In plainer terms, our current inspiration and obsession? Shadow.

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