When Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, husband and wife Nick and Rachel Cope, like many other residents, found themselves stuck at home, in their Red Hook, Brooklyn, apartment. As a result of the storm, the New York University hospital unit where Rachel worked as an art therapist temporarily shut down, offering her a six-month paid leave, and many of the interiors projects Nick was working on were smack in the middle of downtown Manhattan’s blackout zone, where a good chunk of the city’s lower half lost power.

“We had to find something to do,” Rachel says. “We’d always wanted to work together and we share a similar aesthetic for interiors so we just said, ‘Let’s use this time as an opportunity to actually make something really special.’ ”

Sifting through samples of their Calico collection, inspired by Turkish marbleizing techniques.

The result was a cache of marbleized papers, hundreds of them. Rachel created her own paper using pulverized watercolor paper and a paper making kit—a skill she learned from her mother—which she dyed in beautiful patterns with natural pigments, inspired by a Turkish technique. Nick, ever the interior designer, had an epiphany: Wouldn’t they look stunning as wall coverings? The duo began cutting the giant originals into pieces so they could be scanned at extremely high definition and digitally stitched back together. The resulting patterns, used like wallpaper, were non-repeating, a quality Nick says is impossible to achieve by hand at such scale.

More than three years later, the operation—named Calico Wallpaper after the couple’s cat—has boomed into a buzzy label that has shown at Salone del Mobile in Milan and Design Miami. And as the orders skyrocketed, one thing was immediately clear: They had to stop running the business out of their Red Hook apartment. Another life change—a new baby—sealed the deal.

Rachel and Nick finger through a few books, seated on a sofa they picked up at the Future Perfect.

“She moved in and we moved our office out,” Rachel says with a laugh. And while the couple’s new studio space is just three minutes away from their home, it’s a completely new world. Says Rachel: “We can finally breathe.”

“It’s about the same amount of space we had at home,” Nick says. “But less Tetris-y.” Not to mention, they no longer have to call meetings next to a washer and dryer.

The new spot is sunny and spare; they refinished the floors, painted the walls, hung some of Rachel’s original artworks, and built a few long tables where their staff—a number that fluctuates between six and eight—sits behind their Apple desktops.

The sunny studio features several long tables that Rachel and Nick made themselves.

Now that the studio’s paper—100 percent cotton coated with alum, a chemical compound which helps the pigments take to the surface—is produced by Dieu Donné in Chelsea, and their printing is done in California, this space is truly their laboratory. Here, they get inspired, make original artworks (Rachel has a dying station set up on one side of the room), scan the pieces, and create the custom designs. They experiment with new materials—grinding up calcite, for instance, to add a slight shimmer—or bat around the idea of printing on gold leaf. Perhaps it goes without saying, but their dry-erase board is scrawled with the names of designers and special projects that seriously peaked our interest.

“I love making these original artworks, and Nick has this incredible understanding of digital design,” Rachel says. “And the new space lets us do both pretty seamlessly—it’s a good fit.”

A selection of natural pigments and ceramic vessels populate the work space Rachel uses to create original artworks.