Architectural Cases

Luxury wallpaper has undergone a significant transformation, evolving from a mere decorative after-thought to a pivotal architectural component. Selected Wallpapers & Interiors stands at the forefront of this evolution, advocating for spaces where the inherent qualities of materials and profound textual experiences take precedence over superficial adornment. This new approach sees wallcoverings being chosen at the inception of a design project, allowing them to shape the overall ambiance, spatial dynamics, and distinct character of high-end residential and boutique hospitality settings.

Luxury Wallpaper: A Foundational Element in Modern Interior Design

Selected Wallpapers & Interiors, based in the Netherlands, has redefined its role, acting more as a material consultancy than a conventional retailer. Collaborating with European architects, the company meticulously curates intricate interior schemes, offering expert guidance on integrating diverse tactile surfaces within specific spatial constraints. Representing 55 premier global design houses, including esteemed names like Arte, Élitis, Dedar, and Casamance, the firm upholds wallcoverings as a sophisticated craft. Through an array of woven textiles, organic fibers, wood veneers, and meticulously hand-finished reliefs, their opulent wallpapers imbue surfaces with a sense of scale, rich texture, and a unique ability to interact with light, effects that traditional paint simply cannot replicate.

For Selected Wallpapers & Interiors, this shift is fundamentally philosophical. Walls are no longer passive backdrops awaiting decoration; they are active participants in defining a room's rhythm, proportions, and identity. Much like bespoke furnishings, wallcoverings now influence the emotional resonance of a space long before any individual object is introduced. This concept finds its clearest expression in luxury wallpaper, particularly through partners like Arte, a Belgian brand renowned for its artisanal craftsmanship in hotels and residences worldwide. Arte’s designs, characterized by an interplay of rich textures, bold structural reliefs, and refined motifs, transform walls and partitions into dynamic spatial features. Materials such as natural fibers, woven grasscloth, and handmade dimensional finishes lend wallcoverings a profound depth, interacting harmoniously with their surroundings. Beyond visual warmth, these organic elements soften rigid architectural lines and offer considerable acoustic comfort. To ensure perfect integration, Selected Wallpapers & Interiors provides physical samples, facilitating a precise specification process that guarantees every space achieves balance, authenticity, and enduring appeal.

This evolution of luxury wallpaper into a fundamental architectural component marks an exciting chapter in interior design. It underscores a growing appreciation for craftsmanship, material integrity, and the transformative power of tactile surfaces. Designers and homeowners alike are embracing wallcoverings not just for their aesthetic appeal, but for their capacity to profoundly shape and enrich living and commercial environments, turning walls into truly integral elements of sophisticated design narratives.

Barcelona and New York-based studio TAKK is challenging the long-standing conventions of residential architecture, advocating for a reimagining of living spaces beyond the traditional room-and-corridor model. Through their architectural practice and extensive research, founders Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño propose a more fluid and responsive approach to home design. They argue that contemporary homes should be organized around evolving factors such as climate, varying degrees of intimacy, caregiving needs, and shared living arrangements, rather than fixed, specialized rooms. This innovative perspective seeks to create dynamic environments that are adaptable to the diverse and changing lifestyles of their inhabitants.

TAKK contends that the familiar layout of distinct rooms connected by corridors is not an inherent architectural truth, but rather a historical construct rooted in the rise of the modern bourgeois home. This traditional arrangement, which emerged over a century ago, shaped not only spatial organization but also reinforced specific social, economic, and energy consumption patterns. Such designs, the studio observes, can hinder natural ventilation, encourage uniform temperature control across an entire dwelling, and subtly embed hierarchies among occupants and their daily activities. Moreover, these conventional layouts can influence the visibility of care work, define what constitutes a 'standard' family unit, and even dictate which species are welcome indoors. As TAKK plainly states, domestic architecture has never been a neutral entity; it actively produces and reflects certain ways of living.

This critical stance forms the core of TAKK's interdisciplinary practice, which spans built projects, art installations, exhibitions, and academic inquiry. The studio’s broader investigations delve into how ecological frameworks can transform not only the materials used in architecture but also the political and material imaginaries it generates. Notable achievements include Luzárraga and Muiño's curation of the Catalan Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, and their ongoing '100 Words for Water' research project, published by Lars Müller Publishers. This project convenes experts from architecture, philosophy, activism, and science to provoke a deeper reconsideration of humanity's relationship with water. However, it is within the domestic interior that these complex concerns—involving resources, bodies, temperature, and power—become most tangibly immediate, serving as a precise laboratory for their ideas.

TAKK emphasizes that a house does more than merely accommodate life; it actively shapes it. The placement of a kitchen, the presence or absence of a door, the nature of a threshold between two areas, or the dimensions of a communal space can profoundly influence social interactions, the blending of activities, and the visibility of care routines. Consequently, the studio prefers to view housing as an 'infrastructure for coexistence' rather than a mere 'container of functions.' Instead of rigidly assigning single activities to individual rooms, architectural design should begin by considering the types of relationships it aims to foster. While this conceptual shift might appear minor on blueprints, its social implications are far-reaching.

The relevance of this approach is amplified by the increasing diversity of contemporary households, which frequently deviate from the traditional nuclear family model that much twentieth-century housing was designed to serve. TAKK highlights the prevalence of intergenerational living, communal arrangements among friends, homes shared for economic or social reasons, and the routine negotiation of space with companion animals. The studio argues that prevailing architectural models largely fail to adequately represent this evolving social tapestry. Thus, designing a home transcends simply determining the optimal number of bedrooms; it necessitates a conscious decision about which relationships to facilitate, which forms of care to render visible, and which new modes of coexistence to enable.

This perspective elucidates why TAKK's domestic experiments often seek not to eliminate rooms entirely, but rather to diminish their rigid authority. Privacy, for instance, can exist along a spectrum rather than being solely contingent on a single door. Functions can overlap and merge, and various parts of a home can become more or less suitable for habitation depending on the season, temperature, or time of day. This fluidity replaces the static nature of fixed plans with something akin to a dynamic set of conditions. As the studio articulates, "Designing a dwelling is less about crafting specific spaces and more about cultivating the circumstances from which alternative ways of communal living can emerge." In this interpretation, the house remains purposefully 'unfinished'—not as a prescriptive guide for daily life, but as an adaptable framework capable of embracing its inherent complexities.

This embrace of flexibility extends to challenging another deeply ingrained domestic convention: the expectation of constant, uniform comfort. TAKK notes that for decades, wellbeing has increasingly been equated with maintaining a consistent indoor temperature, irrespective of external climate, orientation, or seasonal changes. This notion, while recent historically, is energetically demanding. Historically, human habitation was far more adaptive; occupants would move towards sunlight in colder months, seek shade in summer, and utilize different areas of a home throughout the day or year. TAKK is not advocating for discomfort but proposing that comfort itself could become 'dynamic, localized, and changing.' This approach allows architecture to collaborate with climatic variations instead of mechanically suppressing them.

From this viewpoint, constraints such as budget, energy, and resource limitations are not unfortunate obstacles but rather valuable design prompts. They compel a more insightful—and perhaps more constructive—question: what are our true necessities for living well, and what practices have we merely inherited as default settings? TAKK suggests that future homes may not be less comfortable, but instead more adaptable, more attuned to seasonal rhythms, and more actively connected to their environments. Thus, 'life after rooms' does not imply a future devoid of bedrooms or kitchens. Instead, it signifies recognizing that these familiar architectural boxes are merely one organizational paradigm for domestic life, not its ultimate or exclusive form. After a century of architecture often serving to insulate us from the external world, TAKK's proposition is refreshingly straightforward: perhaps the home could cease its resistance to its surroundings and instead learn to coexist with them.