Interior designer Alison Pickart’s design for de Gournay draws on the landscape of the magnificent redwoods and includes woodland creatures, such as raccoons, foxes and red-tailed hawks. (Photo by Chris Andre)
Imagine meandering through California’s magnificent redwood forests teeming with woodland life—squirrels, bobcats, native lilies and sword ferns. It’s a setting that San Francisco interior designer Alison Pickart majestically captured in de Gournay’s first- ever West Coast-inspired Scenic Collection of wallpapers. Here, Luxe chats all things whimsy with the designer.
The most fitting collaborations are effortless. Tell us about your relationship with de Gournay. As a bespoke heritage brand, de Gournay’s work has always caught my eye. I started by using the designs in smaller spaces and then worked up to larger applications. After a few projects, I became friends with owners Rachel and Hannah Cecil Gurney and the de Gournay team. The brand is very much in line with my design ethos: “If you can imagine it, you can do it.” But it was this one project in East Bay, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Luxe San Francisco, that helped to bring about this exciting collaboration.
You give your client a lot of credit for this collection. What was the inspiration? I proposed the idea of using a different de Gournay pattern. However, this client is very clued-in on the local flora and fauna. He loved the direction but wondered what we could do that would be “very California.” I looked out the windows of the second-story property surrounded by three large redwood groves and thought, “Done! It’s redwoods and can’t be anything else.” I often look to nature and see hundreds of different colors, shapes and textures together. The most unlikely combinations are the most spectacular.
Panoramic patterns tend to veer traditional. How did you strike a versatile note with this scene? Nature always provides the ultimate baseline of beauty, and I believe this collection can be enjoyed from any perspective. In many ways, the different colorways can be the aesthetic catalyst. In addition to the original, there is a lavender version (Aurore), a sepia tone style (Eau Forte) and a blue one (Mare Verde). When you move into the lavender and sepia tone colorways, the inflection is more fantastical and otherworldly, and that helps skew an interior more modern versus traditional.
Where do you envision this being used? Any location that has a high ceiling, like a dining room or foyer. We’re installing the lavender colorway in my studio’s conference room with 12.5-foot ceilings. Personally, I would love to see it in Kamala Harris’s Washington, D.C., dining room—I think that would be a fantastic nod to California.
