An Intentional Interview with a Creator of ‘Accidentally Wes Anderson’
Wally Koval is an expert on how to find beauty everywhere—including when you travel.
Set-jetting—or the trend of picking a travel destination inspired by your favorite movies and TV shows—is currently all the rage, with people flocking to visit the locations of of their favorite films, like Stand by Me or Silence of the Lambs, television shows like White Lotus (or, yes, Real Housewives), or even music videos. But what if the set was all around you? And your favorite film, your own life?
This is essentially the premise behind Accidentally Wes Anderson, or AWA. What started as an Instagram account by Wally and Amanda Koval in 2017 to document aesthetic, idiosyncratic, and aspirational destinations, has turned into a full-fledged business endorsed by the famed director himself. They’ve broken out of the Instagram account to produce a puzzle, a book of postcards, and, as of October 22, two gorgeous coffee table books, with the release of Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures.
An “adventure” is what the Kovals call any excursion, big or small, and the success of AWA is largely due to their thriving community of intrepid contributors. For this new book they culled 100,000 submitted photos down to 200, contracting 163 photographers from dozens of countries. “This is a compilation of many photographers from the community, 92 percent of which were photographed on their iPhone or smartphone,” Wally tells Thrillist. “And the vast majority are just kind of normal people.”
About 80 percent of the submissions, he says, are from people documenting their time in a new destination, an illustration of one of the project’s main themes: Sometimes seeing beauty just takes a change in perspective, a removal from the everyday blur. “I think some of my favorite comments that we get on the Instagram account or on our website are when people say, ‘oh my god, I walk by this building every day, and I never would have guessed that it would have been featured on your account,’” says Wally.
The entries in this book—sort of a stylized Atlas Obscura, Roadside America, or any of the other off-the-beaten track travel guides—all have one thing in common: images were inspired by the visual language of Wes Anderson. But that can be pretty subjective. “It's a moment of delight. Or maybe it's this intersection of distinctive design and unexpected narrative, so to speak,” says Wally. “There are certain fundamental aspects to it. There's pastels. It's probably symmetrical. It’s got a little bit of heart, little bit of soul, a mix of old and new, and a sprinkling of nostalgia. But I think at the end of the day, it's something that you know when you see it.”
Each photo in the book is accompanied by a story, be it a history of the town where it was taken, an incident that occurred there, a famous resident, or something else. There’s Jincumbilly, a town in Australia that has more platypuses than people, an aquarium in Seaside, Oregon, where a gigantic lobster named Victor was once ineptly abducted, and payphones in Philadelphia’s Suburban Station, which a community group is hoping to restore to make calls free for everyone. The blurbs are so compelling that they have their own companion audiobook narrated by Jeff Goldblum.
After 16 years living in Brooklyn, Wally and Amanda recently moved back to their hometown of Wilmington, Delaware—which was featured in their first book. Wally spoke to us from their 100-year-old home, which, if we’re being honest, is right on brand.
Does Wilmington have an Accidentally Wes Anderson aesthetic? Do you think that being from there somehow fueled your love of design?
The cool thing is that any place can be aesthetic. It's funny, because we have organizations that reach out to us, and they'll say, you know, I don't know if our city, state, town, would meet your design aesthetic levels. And then I have to pause them and say, wait, it's not that we're like, well, we can only go to Paris and to Milan.
When I look back at my personal Instagram before any of this started, I don't think that it has to do with the place that we're from. I think it just has to do with the way that you're looking at the world almost, and maybe trying to capture it in a certain way.
You say that nostalgia plays a part in the AWA aesthetic, which is interesting because many of us are feeling nostalgic for things we’ve never actually experienced.
There's like a tactile aspect to some of it too, which might be like one of the fringe fundamentals, if you will. But I don't know—a rotary phone, a compass, an actual library, a book, a typewriter? Why do these things evoke nostalgia? I mean, I don't know. There's also something about it that's also coming back into the wider conversation. We're so engrossed in a digital world, good, bad or indifferent, that I think now we're kind of pulling back a little.
Why do you think the Wes Anderson aesthetic resonates?
Wes Anderson builds everything in a studio, and he is storyboarding what he's doing. He knows before he goes in what he's going to shoot, and everything is going to be just so, and there is an aesthetic that has come from that that Amanda and I have become interested in.
We’ve taken that and kind of turned that lens on the real world, which is not perfect. It's very imperfect at times, and sometimes it can be not very beautiful. But if you look at it through that lens, the mundane and the day to day can have that sparkle, can have that twinkle.
I think that’s the crux of the Wes Anderson TikTok trend too, people finding magic in the everyday.
Yes, 100 percent. When you stop and you look at something that’s been a part of your daily blur, when you tilt your head slightly, you go, ‘Oh, that is very beautiful. There’s an interesting aspect here that I did not know before.’
Do you find that people plan trips based on your images?
Interestingly enough, we did a survey recently, and it turns out that people do plan trips based on our images. 40 percent of our community said that they traveled to a location because they saw it on our website or in our book or on our Instagram, which is wild.
You introduce the book with a pink house in London. Why that image?
This was one we had posted a very long time ago. When we did an exhibition in London, we ended up putting this photo up. And then we started being tagged in this news article about the pink house. This man, Peter, has lived in that pink house since maybe the ’70s and he was upset because influencers and whatnot had gone to his house, taken pictures outside, and broken the tiles on his staircase. That made me feel terrible. I know it wasn't only because of us that people were taking pictures of this beautiful home, but we were named in the article. So I reached out to him, and I was like, Peter, I want to pay for your tile. And he said, he said, I don't really need you to pay for my tile, but I would love a copy of your book.
He invited us over to the house when we were in London and told us his story. And ultimately he told us, you know, I love that people come to take pictures of my home. I just want them to respect it. And so instead of telling more of a traditional story about the house itself and the architecture and Notting Hill, we use that as the starting point to our book to say, please explore responsibly.
I find that fascinating. What happens if you live in a particularly gorgeous or famous house and people are just outside all day taking pictures? Peter was very nice about it.
He's super nice. I think that when it comes to that, what we always try to share with our community is to explore responsibly, quote, unquote, but mostly, pretend you're a fly on the wall. It's the same thing as if you go into a national park, right? You take out what you bring in.