The house on the Plaza Alfaro in Seville has long been claimed as the balcony of Romeo and Juliet, on evidence that is thin and rather beside the point. What matters for a wallpaper is the architecture itself: rendered walls, deep window reveals, and the wrought-iron balustrades that Andalusian ironworkers turned into something between a railing and a screen.
Alfaro draws all of it. The ironwork gives the design its structure, scrolled, repeated, holding the composition together, and the planting grows through and around it, tropical flowers pushing between the bars in the way they actually do on those streets. The result is architectural and botanical at once, with the flatness of a good elevation drawing rather than the depth of a view.
Because the ironwork carries a strong vertical rhythm, the paper lifts a low room and orders a tall one. It is at home in a garden room, a kitchen, a hall opening onto a courtyard, or anywhere the outside is close by. Pair it with painted joinery, terracotta and plain linen, and leave the rest of the room quiet; the design is doing enough on its own. It also does well in a stairwell, where the vertical ironwork answers the climb.
