This gorgeous wallpaper turns your home into an M.C. Escher drawing

Like a view into an animated fantasyland or an ancient city on another planet, a new series of architectural-inspired wallpapers has radically reinvented the wall covering.



[Image: Lato x Lato/Inkiostro Bianco]



The collection was designed for Italian wall covering brand Inkiostro Bianco by Lato x Lato, a design firm with projects ranging from furniture to lighting to interiors. Their designs take outlandish architecture and city scenes and distill them down into a pastel optical illusion of three-dimensional space. Walls become dreamlike portals to fanciful realms typically seen in films and video games.



[Image: Lato x Lato/Inkiostro Bianco]



Lato x Lato cofounders Francesco Breganze de Capnist and Virginia Valentini say the idea for the designs came from “observing the metropolitan context that surrounds us every day.”



[Image: Lato x Lato/Inkiostro Bianco]



In one, a wall of bricks is interlaced with narrow windows reflecting what appears to be a sky with multiple suns. Another is a Cubist-like skyline of slender high-rises adorned with stylistic staircases.



[Image: Lato x Lato/Inkiostro Bianco]



The designs call to mind a neutral-tone M.C. Escher drawing, or the postmodernist maze architecture of the video game Monument Valley.



[Image: Lato x Lato/Inkiostro Bianco]



Breganze de Capnist and Valentini explain via email that the wallpapers are intended to reflect the relationship between interiors and exteriors in architecture—turning walls into windows. Two of the wallpapers “represent the city and what can be observed looking out of the window of an apartment or a skyscraper,” they write, and “the other two wallpapers invite you to look inside a space, just like we all do when we stroll around the city and spy on the inside of apartments and buildings.”



[Image: Lato x Lato/Inkiostro Bianco]



The designers, both also trained architects, say their work is influenced by Italian architecture and design from the 1950s as well as metaphysical art. But the true roots of the wallpaper date back much earlier, they say, calling them a “reinterpretation of the trompe l’oeil that has always been represented in noble buildings throughout history.”