If you’re not in the building trades, perhaps you’re not familiar with the resilient, resistant, and ultra-strong substance called Tyvek. Also known in construction circles as “housewrap,” this useful product installs between sheathing and siding and provides extra protection against the chill winds of winter and the lashing spring rains. But who could have foreseen its utility as an integral component of high design? One Tracy Kendall, in fact, whose Outdoor Wallpaper transforms the stuff into a gloriously faceted surface possessing all manner of textural intrigue.

Outdoor Wallpaper. Designed by Tracy Kendall.

Tracy Kendall’s Outdoor Wallpaper Graces the Walls at the Chelsea Flower Show

I have some familiarity with Tyvek, having done my time as a carpenter and also having mailed my fill of those impenetrable Tyvek envelopes. Accordingly, I’m a frequent admirer of the product’s deft synthesis of durability and malleability. For the life of me, however, I can’t figure out how Kendall has shaped the product into the elegant over-lapping configuration that drew accolades at 2011’s incarnation of London’s Chelsea Flower Show.

Perhaps it was nothing more than an artist’s expert eye and an artisan’s endless patience that let Kendall first conceive of the crafty and creative design, and then process the ostensibly innumerable number of Tyvek sheets required to achieve the cascading, undulating effect that makes the display so interesting.

Whatever the process, the result is engaging and exhilarating—an apt accompaniment to the myriad textures of outdoor spaces and a clever, creative use of an affordable alternative material: “the outdoor wallpaper puts together the most modern of materials with hand crafted workmanship producing a wallpaper which withstands the wind and rain of the British weather and beyond but still looks beautiful and serene.”

About the Designer: London-based Designer Tracy Kendall is regional in the sense that her quirky and intriguing wallpapers “have a strong sense of British inventiveness and eccentricity,” yet international in the way she has parlayed this aesthetic into a style that has drawn accolades from publications as far reaching as Marie Claire, Elle Decoration, and Deco. Kendall likes to use unorthodox materials in her quest to “fulfill a demand for beauty but still need to be able to be pasted to a wall.” Some of her more noteworthy designs include her Text, Texture, and Sequins lines.