Arty Backgrounds: Droog Wallpaper Collection

So far quite a few creatives have been using Rijksmuseum's Rijksstudio since it became available last year. The products developed employing this online archive comprising thousands of works from the museum collection have been surprising and, in the case of Studio Droog, simply unique.

Droog researched and studied the museum collection to develop entirely new products that move from the Rijksmuseum's archives, but that are also characterised by a modern eye and a fresh approach to design.

For the Autumn 2014 season Droog will be launching a new product – a line of wallpapers – inspired by the classic art works from the Rijksmuseum and Dutch church buildings (available from 2nd September from the Droog Store in Amsterdam).

The collection – featuring designs by Studio Droog, and graphic designers Irma Boom and Mieke Gerritzen – includes six different wallpapers. People who are into floral murals and patterns can opt for the "Berries and Branches" one that moves from the "Silk Fabric with Colourful Painted Floral Pattern" made in 1775-1800 in Kanton, China; tapestry lovers can surround themselves with the idyllic indoor forest of "Pleasure Grounds", inspired by the original wall hanging "Park View with Seated Pair and Resting Hunters", made by Fransçois Coppens between 1685-1740 in Delft.

"Stucco" is instead dedicated to people who are into architecture and fine interior details: the wallpaper integrates a selection of the best stucco reliefs, found on the walls and ceilings of churches and palaces from Amsterdam and beyond, redesigned into a contemporary composition by colouring, mirroring and scaling.

Paintings are celebrated via "Flowers" and "Old Masters": the former consists in a wallpaper displaying a large bouquet of blooming roses, irises and tulips, from the original painting "Still Life with Flowers" made by Coenraet Roepel in 1721 in The Hague; the latter is an ironic take on people who may be in two minds about getting this or that painter up on a wall.

Mieke Gerritzen's "Old Masters" offers the chance to have an entire wall of famous painters (while allowing all of us not wealthy enough to afford to buy original art to boast about having a wall full of Vermeer and Rembrandt's…) in an optical key: from a distance, the images form indeed a clever diagonal pattern.

The craziest wallpaper design remains "Rijksmuseum DNA": Irma Boom created this design by using the colour palette she developed as part of the new house style for the reopened Rijksmuseum in 2013.

The wonderful inside story is that Boom spent ten years deconstructing the museum's paintings and works of famous artists to distill their colour DNA – the six colours that make up the painting. These colour schemes and DNA swatches of an individual painting (including Vermeer's "The Milkmaid") are available as wallpaper in narrow or broad striping (that at times very aptly calls to mind aerial views of colourful stripes of tulip fields from the Netherlands…) that can be mixed and matched.

Whoever said that wallpaper is soulless, humourless and does not display any conceptual research behind it, simply didn't imagine Droog's wallpaper.