A Note From Rebecca: On Thinking Bigger
October 1st, 2024
The idea of living in your favorite place—capturing the elements that make you feel alive and happy there—inspires so much of my art. That’s why I look to nature for my designs and color palettes. I want each pattern to be a tool you can use to channel the mood of a landscape that inspires or delights or calms you, because that’s how you create a harmonious home.
When something in nature resonates with us, it reflects something inside us. That place inside, where we feel that recognition, is a living landscape. When the things that surround you, inside and out, are in sync—when your environment reflects your living landscape—you’re at your best. Like art and poetry, interior design has the power to do that for us.
But design isn’t easy, as you all know well. It takes a special expertise and careful consideration to assemble a room that sings. Lately, I’ve been interested in devising ways to make doing that easier and more intuitive. I’ve been exploring the impact larger scale designs can have on a space and how it feels to think and live in it. That’s how I started working on murals. I love murals, whether they depict a naturalistic landscape or an abstract one.
The other reason I’ve been thinking bigger is I have the room to now. It’s a luxury, at work and at home. My studio here in Charleston is the size of our entire New York office. I’m lucky to have wide, tall walls to pin things up to work on. It’s easy for me to unfurl a giant roll of paper on the floor or step out to the park with a 40-inch sketchpad to paint here. At home, I’m still in the process of getting settled, and although I’m in no hurry to finish (nor do I think there’s any such thing as “finished”), I’m realizing firsthand what it takes to decorate a full-size house. In Brooklyn, our apartment had two rooms; I had one little, blank expanse to wallpaper between the bathroom and the kitchen. Now I have entire rooms to think about. I can scale up the motifs, play with panels, …that’s something I’ve never done before.
The two murals we’re debuting this season include an outdoor scene I painted in my beloved Hampton Park here in Charleston and an imagined landscape of delicate bubbles. I painted them by hand, experimenting, as they are my first murals. I worked full scale and also on smaller pieces of paper that I taped together. Figuring out the size of the panels and the repeats required trying things out and thinking in new ways. I even covered my dining room in my favorite one to get the full effect. It’s totally immersive and alive, exactly the way I wanted. I can’t wait to hear what you think of our murals and see how you use them in your projects. As always, if you have any questions about scale or samples, please reach out to us.
Thank you, Rebecca
View Rebecca’s new murals here featured in the Southern Living Idea House.