Crippling tendonitis is what forced Melanie Nead to abandon her 15-year career as a custom tattoo artist at Icon Tattoo Studio in Portland, Oregon, but there had long been signs her next professional chapter would unfold in design. There was the intricate damask-style stencil she adorned on one of Icon’s walls as an ode to the lace and old American embroidery samplers “I have a tiny obsession with,” as she puts it, and there were the imaginative tattoos themselves conceived with elaborate patterns. There was even her childhood in Santa Cruz, California, which revolved around drawing, sewing, and experimenting with clay.
Charleston’s marshlands inspired the Crossing’s mural at the Cooper hotel
“Tattooing is a hard craft to learn. Because you’re working on human bodies, you’re concerned with space and how two-dimensional forms interact with a three-dimensional object. You end up developing these superpower fine motor hand skills,” Nead explains.
Skills, it turns out, that come in quite handy in the decorative arts. Nead founded the design collective Lonesome Pictopia in Portland’s Eliot neighborhood—conveniently across the street from Icon—in 2017, and alongside principals Sierra Gotelli and Tashina Hill, designs and installs wallpapers, murals, and tiles that are at turns lush, exuberant, and nostalgic.
Nead, who moved to Portland to attend Lewis & Clark College in 1999, first ventured into interiors with artwork in the inaugural, now-shuttered location of Bernstein’s Bagels (co-owned by her husband). For the current shop, next door to Nead’s atelier, she honored the building’s late-19th-century Chicago-style architecture with an Art Nouveau-reminiscent frieze and a large-scale mural depicting the ingredients of an everything bagel as a series of graceful, step-and-repeat bouquets.
Now, hangouts throughout the city are graced with Lonesome Pictopia’s handiwork, including the ancient Greek figure vase-inspired Solomon’s Seal wallpaper elevating Dirty Pretty, as well as the Box Social’s tailor-made brass leaf-gilded Art Deco mural.
Each project derives from a specific narrative and is approached like a bespoke tattoo. “We think a lot about the geography of a place, the era of a building, and flora and fauna,” says Nead. “We also soften hard angles, using paint to accentuate or hide architectural features. We turn something boring like a pass-through hallway into something expansive and magical.”
A handpainted gold mural wraps the walls at Psychic cocktail bar in Portland, Oregon
In Charleston, South Carolina, Nead and her team recently collaborated with New York firm Meyer Davis on the Crossing restaurant at the Cooper hotel. Here, they dreamed up cocooning drapery handpainted with a historic map of the region for the Captain’s Lounge, while the private dining room features reinterpreted images of the Lowcountry’s salt marsh landscape. “We thought about how we could present it in a novel way and ended up doing a mural of tall marsh grasses, so you feel enclosed by them, as if you’re down on the water in a kayak,” she says.
Nead’s passion for hospitality stems from her attraction to public spaces like train stations and libraries. “They appeal to the most idealistic part of me,” she says. “You find such a cross-section of community passing through and hopefully you find joy being in a beautiful space.”
Brass leaf gilded details define the mural in the Box Social in Portland
This article originally appeared in HD’s August 2026 issue.