In 1979 a twenty-five-year-old named Robert Albert started a textile company and gave it a name that doubled as a dare. Coraggio is Italian for courage, and the house still likes to say that redefining luxury takes exactly that.
For more than four decades Coraggio sold only to the design trade, working with master weavers in Italy and building a client list that ran through showrooms in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta. In 2022 it joined Thibaut, which has been making wallpaper since 1886 and counts itself the oldest working wallpaper company in America. The two still run largely on their own terms, and Coraggio has kept its particular way of seeing a room: quiet colour, a great deal of texture, and the conviction that a wall or a cushion should feel as good as it looks. Both the wallpapers and the fabrics are now at Wallpaper Sales.
"Coraggio has kept its particular way of seeing a room: quiet colour, a great deal of texture, and a surface that feels as good as it looks."
Walls You Want to Touch
The Coraggio wallpaper range is built almost entirely on surface. The new Spring 2026 papers are mostly natural grasscloths, each with a character of its own. Ramo in Espresso lays wide, knotted bands of fibre across the wall like strips of bark, dark enough to make a library of a set of shelves. Dedalo in Natural takes the opposite approach, a chunky basket grid that brings the warmth of a woven chair to a whole room.
Seta Rigata runs dark striations through a pale weave in long horizontal courses, while Yakisugi borrows its name from the Japanese art of charring cedar to preserve it. In White, its fine vertical grid has the dry, crackled surface of burnt timber washed pale, and it looks remarkably at home in a cloakroom.
Ramo, Espresso
Dedalo, Natural
Seta Rigata, Natural
Yakisugi, White
Where pattern does appear, it is drawn with a light hand. La Corda sends long cords curving across black grasscloth in slow ribbons, and Waves moves marbled swirls of greige across the wall like water over stone. Facets in Cognac is finely woven and flecked so that it catches the light, and Elevato lays an open windowpane grid over a linen weave, as easy beside a gilt frame as it is beside a palm.
La Corda, Black
Waves, Greige and Grey
Facets, Cognac
Elevato, Natural
A Los Angeles Love Story
The fabrics are where Coraggio's newest chapter begins. For its first ever design partnership, the house turned to Thomas Lavin, a third-generation Angeleno whose family worked in film and whose showrooms in Los Angeles and Laguna Niguel are a fixture of the Southern California design trade. Lavin grew up in the Pacific Palisades, and the films of the 1930s and 1940s, with their luminous interiors and endless sense of possibility, left a lasting mark on him.
The Coraggio x Thomas Lavin collection, launched this autumn, is built around two colour stories: the clear warmth of California daylight, and the deeper, cinematic tones of dusk, when the city starts to glow. The names carry a little of that geography: Via De La Paz, a densely piled mohair velvet, shares its name with the main street of the Palisades. Pavia Place is a jacquard of interlocking blocks and bars in the manner of a cubist painting, Monaco Drive a weave flecked like polished stone, and Chautauqua a crushed, nubby bouclé whose loops catch the light unevenly. Borgos Place raises a close grid of overlapping discs in low relief, and in Angora it turns a simple chaise into a piece of sculpture.
Pavia Place, Lagoon
Monaco Drive, Java
Chautauqua, Nile
Borgos Place, Angora
"Two colour stories: the clear warmth of California daylight, and the deeper tones of dusk, when the city starts to glow."
Living with Coraggio
Because the papers and the cloths are designed with the same palette of stone, sand, espresso and ink, they layer without effort. A grasscloth like Dedalo or Elevato makes a soft, forgiving backdrop for a bolder upholstery fabric, and the wider Coraggio fabric range, from the Spring 2026 weaves to the Legacy archive, fills in the plains and sheers that let a room breathe.
Natural grasscloths are a living material. Each roll varies slightly in tone and texture, and the joins between drops are part of the charm rather than a fault, so hang them where they will be looked at, not hidden. They are best kept away from splashes, and they reward a careful decorator. Order a sample of any paper or cloth that catches the eye. Texture is the whole point here, and it cannot be judged on a screen. For more on the wider world of woven walls, our guide to grasscloth wallpaper is a good next read.
Coraggio was named for courage, yet its rooms are among the calmest you will find. Perhaps that is the point: it takes a certain nerve to let texture, rather than colour or pattern, do all the talking.
