People are seeking out this San Francisco restaurant to take pics of the wallpaper

The restaurant Fiorella is known for its food ... and its Instagram-famous wallpaper. Called "Bay Area Toile" the wallpaper has attracted the attention of diners and was even noted on a list of Bon Appetit's coolest restaurant trends for 2016. less The restaurant Fiorella is known for its food ... and its Instagram-famous wallpaper. Called "Bay Area Toile" the wallpaper has attracted the attention of diners and was even noted on a list of Bon Appetit's ... more Photo: Grace Sager Photo: Grace Sager Image 1 of / 23 Caption Close People are seeking out this San Francisco restaurant to take pics of the wallpaper 1 / 23 Back to Gallery

It's not often that mere wallpaper can become a social media "thing," but the blue-and-white wallpaper at San Francisco restaurant Fiorella has almost become an attraction unto itself.

The diamond-patterned wall covering has inspired a number of Fiorella's customers to pause and take photos next to it, enthralled by the many Bay Area references embedded into the design. Fiorella co-owner Boris Nemchenok said the wallpaper was "a big hit right away, more so than we ever thought."

"We literally started getting all these tags and just everybody posting on Instagram about the wallpaper," Nemchenok told SFGATE. "We were getting a lot of social media people coming in and wanting to eat their pizza in front of the wallpaper. At that point, it became this thing."

Dubbed "Bay Area Toile" — a nod to the French style of design the wallpaper is modeled after — the wall covering is a who's who of the Bay Area. Among the locals immortalized in its drawings are Joe Montana, Dennis Richmond, Angela Davis and Alice Waters. A number of hip-hop luminaries with Bay Area ties also grace the wallpaper, including E-40, Mac Dre, Too Short and Shock G of Digital Underground.

Also nestled onto the wallpaper are recognizable Bay Area landmarks, including the Grand Lake Theatre, Children's Fairyland, BART, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge and more.

The wallpaper debuted in 2015, but the toile is getting a second wind of popularity with the opening of the new Fiorella location in Russian Hill this spring.

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Matt Ritchie is the artist behind the drawings, and he worked with comedy troupe Lonely Island — made of Bay Area natives Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone — to achieve the look and feel of the current wallpaper. Lonely Island was introduced to Ritchie via artist Alex Pardee when the group sought out someone who could draw their vision of Bay Area Toile.

The project was initially inspired by a similar wallpaper, Brooklyn Toile; as lore has it, the Beastie Boys' Mike Diamond was interested in a wallpaper called Chinatown Toile, which featured a modernized take on toile. Diamond mentioned that he wished it had more about Brooklyn and his upbringing, Flavor Paper founder Jon Sherman told SFGATE.

Already in the midst of creating a Brooklyn version, according to Sherman, Diamond teamed up with the company to create the final product. (He even went on to create a custom Malibu version for his Southern California home, as highlighted in Architectural Digest.)

Photo: Courtesy Jon Sherman / Flavor Paper An image of the Brooklyn Toile wallpaper, which served as the...

When The Lonely Island's Taccone was looking for wallpaper for his own place, the idea of a custom piece came up, and Sherman explained Diamond's connection to the Brooklyn Toile and told him, "if you wanna make something Bay Area-related, we'd love to do it."

With Ritchie onboard — and with Diamond giving The Lonely Island his blessing to create their own version, according to Ritchie — the members of the band would pitch Ritchie their ideas of iconic Bay Area locations and people, while he would try to figure out how to visually represent it.

"A lot of the brainstorming came out between myself and Jorma [Taccone]," said Ritchie. "We'd be on the phone and just talking about places that were important to the members of Lonely Island, who all grew up in the East Bay but spent a ton of time in San Francisco, so we wanted to combine both those areas and the people they were influenced by."

Ritchie worked on the drawings on and off for a year between his own art shows, settling on the diamond design and getting the images to Flavor Paper to finalize the design. The wallpaper was displayed for one night at Oakland's Athen B. gallery (now Part 2 gallery) in 2015, before it gained its Instagram following on Fiorella's walls in 2016.

Ritchie attributes the wallpaper's popularity to the specific selection of local icons, the fact that it's made of locations and people from both San Francisco and the East Bay. "Everybody connects to different things," said Ritchie.

"I think it's [popular because] people explore it. It's overwhelming for so many images in such a condensed area, and then I think that once people connect with one thing, then all of a sudden you kinda spark up and it's, 'Oh, it's Too Short!' 'Mac Dre, whoa!' and then you're investigating it."

Sherman agreed.

"I think the draw is that it does have this classic sense, or this nostalgic aspect to it, but it's very contemporary in its subject matter — and I think that really draws a lot of people in," said Sherman.

"From afar, it just looks like a nice traditional pattern, then you get up closer and you get a secondary experience of engagement and you're really looking through it ... All these little things that trigger all these memories and nostalgia."

A number of Bay Area locals and locales never made the final edit. Among the places that made it onto the cutting room floor was the old-school Bay Bridge, which Ritchie attempted, but decided the intricacies of the double deck design and the bridge's girders wouldn't work due to the small scale of the images. Amoeba Music was another spot that didn't make the cut, and Taccone also acknowledged that "anyone from Berkeley is going to be bummed that Gordo Taqueria isn't on there."

One shared regret expressed by both Ritchie and Taccone was that Warriors star Stephen Curry didn't make it onto the finished product. When the wallpaper was in its final stages, the Warriors won the 2015 NBA championships — the first of three championships in the last four years. Taccone and Ritchie discussed trying to work Curry in, but Ritchie's work obligations made it difficult to add him last minute.

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When asked who he would add to the new wallpaper if he had the chance, Curry tops the list. And if he had his free pick of others to add in, Ritchie said Tom Waits and Les Claypool (of Primus) are also high on that list.

Ritchie has had offers to do a refresh of the wallpaper — Nemchenok already inquired over a new version for the second Fiorella location, Ritchie admitted — but the timing just hasn't worked out with him and Taccone. Meanwhile, Ritchie is focusing on his own work, including having pieces shown at a limited engagement art show centered on "Game of Thrones" at Spoke Art gallery in San Francisco.

Still, the original is bringing a lot of joy to those who happen upon — or even seek out — the diamond toile with its Bay Area legends. A few of the wallpaper's subjects are aware of its existence, giving more credence to the wall covering's likability.

"It's just generally pure nostalgic love for [the design]," said Sherman. "The fact that E-40's mentioned it in his Instagram and Joe Montana had a picture of him taken underneath it, the fact that people are loving that they're a piece of this history I think is fantastic. It really shows the overall love people have of the Bay Area, and that they're proud to see this come out — and it's not a San Francisco wallpaper, it is a Bay Area wallpaper, which I think is pretty important as well."

Read Dianne de Guzman's latest stories and send her news tips at dianne.deguzman@sfgate.com.

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