Heaven has a guest list: Casa Salvaje's bestiary in 149 wallpapers

It's the first thing you look at when you wake and the last before the lights go out: the phone screen, glowing in the half-dark like a small altar. Casa Salvaje isn't only for eating and dancing: it's also for looking. Each world in the house has its own visual universe, and we've turned it into 149 free wallpapers, sized for iPhone and desktop.

A heaven with a guest list

On Colombia's Caribbean coast, the line between the visible and the invisible has always been thin. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Remedios the Beauty rises to heaven, body and soul, while hanging sheets out in the sun, and García Márquez later explained that the sheets were the one detail he took from real life: the idea came from a family who, to cover up a girl's elopement, swore she had gone up to heaven. That's how magic works around here: it doesn't announce itself, it slips in among everyday things.

The house motto comes from the same intuition. Heaven exists, but it has a guest list, and the door opens for gods, mortals and other guests. Our wallpapers are a way to carry a piece of that world in your pocket.

Heaven exists, but it has a guest list.

I · The symbols

Lions on the doors, jaguars in gold

Cartagena has always told its story through animals and symbols. Bronze door knockers still hang on the great doors of the Old City: tradition says lions marked the homes of soldiers or the Church, lizards and iguanas families of noble lineage, and sea creatures the merchants. And long before the walls, Zenú goldsmiths from these savannahs were casting birds, caimans and jaguars in gold, pieces you can still see at the Museo del Oro Zenú on Parque de Bolívar.

II · The series

The house series

• Look Twice: leopard, tiger and zebra prints with hidden eyes.
• Ritual & Desire: mosaic jaguars on green tile.
• The House in Miniature: tiny parties inside giant objects.
• Red Letters: the house's phrases in red type: Bad habits, For pleasure, After dinner, Divine company.
• Heaven Has a Guest List: the blue illustration that gives the house its motto.
• And more: Altars, Wild Eyes, The Skin of the House, Patterns, The House Comes Alive, Engravings and After Dark.

III · The worlds

Each world, its art

La Domenica has its toiles, still lifes and greyhound; Kanibal its red glyphs; SLVJ The Wild Edition; and ONO its Beneath the Skin and Unmask Your Oni series.

IV · The bestiary

A Colombian bestiary

The jaguars, the eyes that peer out from the animal prints and the flowers that take over the walls don't come from nowhere. Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries on earth: it has more bird species than any other, and its national flower is an orchid, Cattleya trianae, chosen in 1936 and named after the Colombian botanist José Jerónimo Triana.

That bestiary has its own tradition in art. Alejandro Obregón, one of the country's great painters, filled his canvases with condors, bulls, barracudas, birds and flowers, and spent the last two decades of his life in Cartagena. Our series speak to that inheritance, to the exuberance of a country where nature has always seemed slightly exaggerated, slightly unreal, and entirely true.

Epilogue

For gods, mortals & other guests.