Katie Deedy, the owner of
Grow House Grow wallpaper designs, didn’t always know she wanted to make bespoke, narrative wallpaper, but once she started there was no going back. Deedy’s passion for making patterns draw on her personal experiences and the curiosities of everyday life. The result? Artwork so rich that you want to cover your walls in it and live surrounded by it.
For her most recent wallpaper inspiration, the born-and-raised New Yorker traveled to Seattle, a city she often imagined as a child, because her father’s job almost transferred her family there. “Before I came here, my idea of Seattle was really clean air,” she said. “I envisioned wilderness, a city surrounded by a lot of greenery. In my child’s mind, it was this mythical place where I could’ve grown up.”
To capture the spirit of the Seattle she had dreamed of, Deedy adopted that whimsical, childlike attitude toward her trip. “When you’re an adult, time tends to move more quickly,” she says. “We get set in our routines and we don’t introduce ourselves to many new novel experiences. Whereas when you’re a child, everything is new and very exciting.”
In the end, Deedy explains, making a wallpaper – in fact creating anything – is about wanting to tell a story in a new environment and new space. See how Deedy turned her trip to Seattle into a pattern.