Sara Ricciardi collaborates with Karpeta and Texturae to blueprint natural panoramas

Italian designer Sara Ricciardi spent her formative years in the countryside surrounding the city of Benevento in Italy. In the midst of lush scenery, Ricciardi grew up listening to anecdotes of Italian witches and dieties. These experiences, in the thick of nature, surrounded by retellings of archaic Italian legends, shaped her as a person and designer. Summoning elements that can evoke sentiments analogous to the emotions experienced when in the midst of the fantastical arenas and tales tasted by Ricciardi, the designer painted her latest rugs and wallpaper collection—entitled Camere—for Italy-based carpet brand Karpeta and wallpaper brand Texturae respectively. Featuring orchid petals, abstractions of leaf and flower foliages, and sceneries inspired by theological narratives, the rugs and wallpapers bear the capacity of infusing indoor environments with a charm cognate with nature.

“By decorating the rooms with the use of visual imagination and stimulating colours, we can travel without leaving the place we are in. Wallpapers and carpets are like chromatic, material friezes bringing charm into our lives. Decorating is the aesthetic spiritual aspiration we wish you to have and practice every single day,” shares product designer, interior designer, and performance artist Sara Ricciardi, delineating the idea that guided her to design the Camere collection, showcased at the recently concluded Maison&Objet.

Ricciardi utilised the production facilities—pertaining to weaving, finishing, textile colouring, and digital printing—in Reggio Calabria to develop the rugs and wallpapers for the collection. With Camere, the vision of two brands came together, resulting in a series of objects that are pivoted on a unanimous theme encapsulating the artistic languages of all three collaborators. While Karpeta is known for keeping alive archaic weaving traditions through contemporary designs, Texturae specialises in creating artistic pieces that divulge human emotions through a play of colours and techniques. Ricciardi’s partnership with the two brands demonstrates the potential of Texturae and Karpeta to develop entities that can be used to enhance the interior environments of residential and contract projects.

The project—comprising five rug designs and 14 wallpaper designs in varying hues—was designed to create 12 thematic rooms. The rooms feature as ecosystems where wallpapers and carpets designed by Ricciardi come together harmoniously to form a dreamy landscape. Some of them include tropical orchids, remastered patterns from British textile designer William Morris’s body of work, sensual foliage, romantic migrations of birds, bright blooms, grotesque compositions of botanical elements, mysterious pastoral ravines, mixed animal liveries, and happy plane trees indicating the change of seasons.

Rugs designed for Karpeta are woven using 100% New Zealand Wool. While the Orchid Petal rug is inspired by the petals of this colourful exotic flower, Soft Foliage draws cues from the layered growth of petals in certain flowers, and Platanismo bears semblance to the chromatic barks of plane trees. Flower Grotesque, on the other hand, is an abstraction of an imaginary flower that has a woolly core and appears grotesque, and Bird Panorama holds the composition of several flying birds carrying flowers and twigs in their beaks.

Ricciardi’s designs for Texturae include Bucolic, a scenery imitating pastoral features such as the lakes, shrubs and valleys found in a remote bucolic locale; Soft Leaves, which mimics the free fall of flower petals; and Will Bloom, which serves as a tribute to William Morris. The Eden wallpaper depicts Ricciardi’s interpretation of Eden and the Noe pattern, inspired by animals from Noah’s Ark, features as a combination of stripes on the bodies of snakes, zebras, and jaguars. Rust, on the other hand, gracefully echoes the imprints left behind by time and exposure. Platanismo, Flower Grotesque, Bird Panorama, and Orchid Panorama wallpapers, like their eponymous rug counterparts, are inspired by the intensely hued barks of plane trees, imagined visuals of hybrid and whimsy florals, flying birds, and a landscape of exotic orchids, respectively. Silky Jungle and Single Jungle Twist wallpapers are iterations of ancient tapestries that would depict lush landscapes behind a tinted hue. Lastly, the Brushed wallpaper by Ricciardi evokes images of crusty indentations left on old walls.

In building the Camere universe, Ricciardi succeeded in designing an experience that can transpose the residents to imaginary worlds full of possibilities.