Updated on 27.07.2022
Change your perspective by changing the walls that surround you. Wallpaper has come back to the future in Vista Lago Residences. We take a look at the options available depending on your taste – photorealism, patterned or mural.
Article by Vivion O’Kelly
These days we can change the entire perspective of a room quite easily, altering its mood to suit ours and bringing a new, almost magic, dimension into our lives in a way that was not possible in the past without spending vast amounts of money.
A Vista Lago residence could not be described as a traditional build. Normal house maintenance is largely a thing of the past, because almost everything in these villas, including what they are built of, is of the highest quality natural materials, and all 18 of them have been designed and built to the highest standards of sustainability. But there is one design element that might spark a tinge of nostalgia in older residents, and that is wallpaper.
Yes, wallpaper has come back to the future in Vista Lago. Not the wallpaper some of us remember struggling to paint with watery glue and attempting to stick to uncooperative surfaces many years ago, but a new kind of wall covering that has nothing in common with what we remember, except that it decorates a wall. Best described as wall coverings, or in many cases, as murals, this wallpaper will open your eyes to a feature of interior design many of us are still unfamiliar with.
The wallpaper used in Vista Lago is not actually made of paper, but of washable materials that do not scratch easily, such as plastic or composite materials that will last a lifetime. Here we take a closer look at some of the options available to all potential Vista Lago owners, which they can choose (as they can choose all interior decorative options) according to individual taste. Although the range of subcategories in contemporary wallpaper is wider, we divide them into three basic categories: photorealism, patterned and mural.
Photorealism
No repeat patterns here, but the use of digital printing technology to create what looks like an extension of a room in what can best be described as magical. You pick the emotion and mood you want for any specific space and the wallpaper utterly transforms it. The scene may be a known work of art not subject to copyright, a landscape, seascape, portrait or any other motif your imagination comes up with. The leaders in this new art form are the Italian company Creativespace.
The pictures show the comprehensive range of moods to be created in a room by the use of photorealistic wallpaper. In some cases the image is more traditionally mural, in that perspective is not extended from the room itself, making for a self-contained image on the wall, while in other cases, the image is lined up with the proportions of the room to create a kind of walk-in effect, where the line between two and three dimensions is blurred.
This wallpaper is paper based when used on dry surfaces and made of fibreglass for bathroom, kitchens and other surfaces that may get damp, but it is all washable and very durable. It is not cheap, at between 50 and 100 euros per square metre, and it requires the services of a professional to hang it. On the other hand, the result will be a room completely transformed to individual taste, at a cost probably a good deal less expensive than many alternatives.
Patterned
Almost all wallpaper of times past was patterned, and we use the word loosely here. The essential difference between this wallpaper and the two other categories we list is that patterned wallpaper, with no specific scene to be framed, will cover any size, since the motif repeats itself ad infinitum. But there the similarity ends. There may be flower motifs, but they are used in a very different way from before, and the repeating patterns are generally designed in such a way that it is difficult to see where repetition begins. One example is the forest scene below, made by Creativespace, where the motif is so large that repetition may go unnoticed.
Patterned wallpaper is, nevertheless, generally painted rather than photographed, and the best examples of this category can be seen in the work of a Finnish company named Feathr, which we featured in the January/April edition of UD Magazine in 2019. The company founders were fed up with what they called ‘white box minimalism’, which has dominated interior design for many decades. Brighter colours, bolder patterns and wild textures were needed, they decided, and a good example of the result is their Oh La La design that won the Homes & Gardens Wallpaper of the Year award, accurately described as ‘distressed shabby chic’.
Mural
This is the kind of wallpaper that mostly resembles a painting, and we have frequently used the work of Australian artist Diana Watson, whose stunning and technically brilliant flower paintings have been transformed into single wallpaper pieces. She does not use flowers in traditional still-life paintings, but creates different moods in many different ways by exploring the infinity of emotion that can be created by colour and form through the flower motif.
Her designs, as we can see in the image below, can be used to cover entire walls or as giant murals framed within the wall itself. In many cases, the colours and tones of the whole room have been chosen to reflect those of the wallpaper/painting. You can read more about Diana Watson and her art in our blog of March 2021.
While each villa in Vista Lago comes fully furnished and decorated, each is also, in a way, a blank slate upon which individual owners can build specific mood, given that new owners can pick and choose as they please from any interior designs in any of the 18 luxury properties. We see contemporary wallpaper as fitting perfectly into the minimalist interiors we have designed, providing contrast or complement as needed, or making the wallpaper the focus of a room or a background element. But however it is used, it has become an essential design feature of a Vista Lago villa.
For more information on Vista Lago Residences visit our information page or call the Sales Team directly on (+34) 682 105 002 or email them on info@by-bright.com
