Earthly Delights

The Green House collection, a collaboration between Belgian wallpaper firm Arte and Dutch design house Moooi, blends history and science to enchanting effect

By Maile Pingel

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With the resurgence of the wildly sublime Victorian aesthetic, botanical and scenic wall coverings are transforming interior landscapes. Belgian wallpaper studio Arte’s new Green House collection brings a revelatory expression to these naturalistic motifs. Developed in collaboration with Moooi, the Dutch design house founded by Marcel Wanders and Casper Vissers in 2001, and known for its edgy, eclectic aesthetic, the collection focuses on highly stylized flora and fauna. It’s an unexpected, up-close view of the natural world—almost as if we’re collectors looking at mysterious specimens through a magnifying glass.

The collection unfolds like a 17th-century kunstkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, revealing ever more excitements from the natural world the closer one looks. (Imagine Emperor Rudolf II, the Hapsburg ruler who filled Prague Castle with such bizarreries as taxidermied chameleons and a crucifix carved from mandrake root, unlocking each cabinet to visitors’ gasps.) But what makes the Green House collection even more layered with history is how Arte and Moooi have played on the Victorian era passion for exotic plants and glass conservatories—architectural feats of their day. Lacy Longlegs is a design that melds spiderwebs with Gothic arches, while Techno Bee, an embroidered design, reads like a microscopic view of a delicate apian wing.

Arte, a third-generation firm run by brothers Philippe and Steven Desart, is based in Belgium’s Haspengouw region, known for fruit production. The rural location gives them proximity to agricultural tradition and an understanding of the importance of biodiversity. With natural materials like silk and wood veneers woven into the designs for textural and sensory effect, there is also palpable respect for the power of Mother Nature and the cycle of life. Much like the “moody cocoons” we see created today with a wash of dark paint, the Green House collection, while playful at first glance, can lend similar gravitas to a room. As A. S. Byatt wrote in her novel Angels and Insects, “The natural world is a delicate balance of beauty and brutality, reminding us of our own mortality.”

The San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers, 1890

San Francisco’s own Conservatory of Flowers is the oldest glass and wood greenhouse in the country, and is modeled after London’s Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew).

“The natural world is a delicate balance of beauty and brutality, reminding us of our own mortality.”

Coccinella Bella is a wallpaper inspired by ladybugs, perhaps a garden’s most charming pollinator, and bright red poppies. The design pays homage to 17th-century Jacobean textiles that were produced in England but rooted in Flemish tapestries, which often depicted woodland scenes, and in Indian palampores, hand-painted or woodblock-printed floral bed coverings brought to Europe by importers like the East India Company. Coccinella Bella is available on a stone or sage background, or as a black and ivory jacquard textile. (The design, along with several others in the collection, is also available from Moooi as a rug.)

The Greenhouse Gathering arch is based on decorative plasterwork moldings and creates the feeling of peering through a conservatory window. Close inspection of the almost art deco–style plants and flowers reveals beetles, bees, spiders, and millipedes. The arched design and its rectangular counterpart, the Greenhouse Gathering window, are available in three monochromatic colorways (Architectural White, Oyster White, and Forest Green) with a suede-like finish.

The design for Lacy Longlegs, a 3D-textile wall covering, is an exploration of filigree-like spiderwebs, leaves, and Gothic arches. The tactile pattern is made with Arte’s proprietary thermoforming technique, which presses the pattern into bouclé fabric, creating the raised and flattened components of the design, almost giving the impression of a late-19th-century flocked wallpaper. Its thickness helps soften sound, creating a quieter retreat.

Woodblock Beetle Flora is a graphic pattern, almost kinetic, inspired by the tracks bark beetles leave behind on tree trunks—especially those of fruit trees. The handmade wall covering is inlayed with wood veneer, an innovative process that references marquetry, an ancient art form that reached its zenith in 18th-century France. The pattern—along with its counterpart, Woodblock Beetle Fern—is available in three wood tones: birch, walnut, and ebony.

Earthly Delights

By Maile Pingel

“The natural world is a delicate balance of beauty and brutality, reminding us of our own mortality.”

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