By Elyse Moody
For Rebecca Atwood, place has always been both compass and catalyst. Her painterly wallpapers and textiles first took shape in response to her time in Cape Cod: The tonal palette, mercurial light, and weathered textures of her childhood home quietly permeated her patterns, even after she left the East Coast behind. In 2021, following a move with her family to Charleston, she once again discovered inspiration through landscapes, this time in the South Carolina marshes and saturated skies.
An avid walker, Atwood acclimated to her new home by exploring Hampton Park, created in 1903, with big, open expanses of green and tree-lined paths. It looked so exotic to her, compared with northeastern landscapes. Here, the foliage was more varied: palmettos, ferns, century-old live oaks with Spanish moss dangling from knobby branches. Compared with the Massachusetts coast, Charleston looked practically Jurassic.
For an artist who studies the shapes of the leaves, it was a lot to take in—in a good way. The dense tree canopy in particular captured Atwood’s imagination, and she soon began bringing her india ink and brushes out with her to paint the scenery from life. She typically works from memory or inspiration images she has taken; she develops most of her hand-painted patterns in her sketchbook in the studio, not on-site in nature. But Hampton Park inspired her to try something new. “I wanted to have this park in our house,” she says. She had never created a large-scale mural for her line before, but that felt to her like the right approach.
“I just taped these big 30-by-40-inch sheets of paper to the cardboard that came with them and started painting. When I ran out of room, I’d switch to a new sheet as I was going, so that everything linked up,” Atwood says. “It felt so good to paint outside. It’s so expansive. I feel like you get the sense of space from the artwork because it was actually painted looking at the trees.”
The resulting mural fills the dining room of her new home in Charleston, and is also available for purchase under her namesake brand. It’s a perfect example of her sought-after, laid-back approach to design—it’s rooted in landscapes and how they make us feel. In fact, that’s the topic of her latest book, The Harmonious Home: Designing Peaceful, Personal Spaces Inspired by Nature, which was released last year.
Atwood’s mural went on to grace the entryway of the Southern Living Idea House by designer Allison Elebash, who compared its calming effect to the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. The washy landscape echoed the marshy Kiowah Island.
In the Lowcountry, you can’t help but be immersed in nature. The beauty of Atwood’s fabrics and wallpapers brings the outdoors in, wherever you are.
