Mr Wally Koval has lived in New York City for more than a decade now. But he still makes a point of visiting the Empire State Building at least once a year, without fail. There is always something new to discover, says the man behind the Instagram account Accidentally Wes Anderson, something he missed before. “I think it is very important to be a tourist in your own town. In the best way possible. ‘Tourist’ has a negative connotation,” he notes. “But if you’re a respectful individual and you do it in the right way, you’ll really be surprised.”

New York, of course, has no shortage of stories. But Mr Koval insists there are tales that are just as interesting built into the walls of every town, everywhere on Earth – as long as you make the effort. “You can go on an adventure anywhere,” he says. There is always magic in the mundane. And he should know, he says – he’s from Delaware.

Mr Koval is here (well, at home, via Zoom) to mark the launch of Accidentally Wes Anderson, which isn’t quite the book of the films, more the book of the Instagram account dedicated to the quintessential style of the films of Mr Wes Anderson. And, as the name suggests, the way his enterprise has turned out wasn’t entirely by design.

“It was meant to be a personal travel bucket list,” says Mr Koval, who started the Instagram account in June 2017. Inspired by a similarly titled community on Reddit, Mr Koval merged whimsical imagery he’d found on the internet – “places that I’d never been before” – with snaps from his own holidays with his wife, Amanda, into what he saw as an open-source mood board.

“I’m not a Yelp guy,” he says. “Not a ‘top 10’ person. When we would travel, Amanda and I, we found a lack of resources that would really mean something to us.” What became Accidentally Wes Anderson (“AWA” as he calls it) presented a way for them to dig deeper. “Just like you make a list of movies that you want to watch so that you don’t have to sift through Netflix on a regular basis, I started documenting places – I used Instagram as that mechanism.”

While sourced from across the globe, he found a common theme ran through these pictures: each one had the feel – not the look, but feel – of the aforementioned Mr Anderson, the singular director of The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Darjeeling Limited, whose work is noted for its distinctive flat-space camera motions, obsessively symmetrical sets and limited colour palettes. But perhaps more than this, Mr Koval argues Mr Anderson’s worldview allows the viewer’s mind to “wander a little bit and expand and explore more than you might if you were watching, say, a Quentin Tarantino movie”.

“I just kept on seeing these places pop up that looked as though they could’ve come from one of his films,” says Mr Koval, who describes himself as a details man. “I do appreciate things in an orderly fashion, perhaps a bit too much.”

From a small, if engaged, core, AWA now has some 1.1 million followers. To date, the #accidentallywesanderson hashtag has been used more than 167,000 times, and Mr Koval continues to post a new image every day, from contributors across the world (some of which can be seen in the book, as well as here). In a touch Mr Anderson himself would appreciate, the community is now served with a regular newsletter, which comes in email form, but is packaged as if it were correspondence from one of the director’s films. And we can only assume that Mr Anderson has time for the spin-off book since the filmmaker wrote its foreword.

“I’m just glad that he didn’t give us a cease and desist,” Mr Koval laughs. “One of the things he said to us was, ‘What I like about what you do is that it’s not so much like what I do’. We’re not a Wes Anderson fan club.”

Sure enough, AWA very much exists in our reality rather than the fictional one of Mr Anderson. But it uses a filter borrowed from the likes of Moonrise Kingdom or The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and turns it outward. “I like to think of it as a real, true physical extension of his incredible body of work,” Mr Koval says. “Taking those imaginary places and giving them a real place in the world. You’re allowed to make up your own movie in your head.”

What exactly the shared quality that connects the swimming pools, cinemas and ferry terminals that litter AWA’s Instagram feed is isn’t that easy to pin down. “You could say there’s a certain colour palette or symmetry, but there’s something about every post that’s indefinable,” Mr Koval says. That each entry has “something slightly magical about it” is all he can conclude.

Whatever it is, perhaps a sprinkling of magic is something we could all do with right now. The book’s release was at one point due to coincide with the arrival of The French Dispatch, the latest effort from Mr Anderson himself. But the film has been shelved until next year, along with, as it happens, travel plans for many of us.

Accidentally Wes Anderson, then, offers a glimpse of what we’re currently missing out on, both on the big screen and in the wider world. But as Mr Koval sees it, it shouldn’t just be an opportunity to live vicariously through very considered, pastel-hewed imagery of somewhere else. Rather, it presents a call to look for the otherworldly, the whimsical, in your own backyard. 

As for Mr Koval, he is, as ever, planning ahead. “I think that more than half the fun of travel is the anticipation,” he says. He notes that many of the comments left on his posts over recent months have been from followers whose holiday plans have been put on hold. “‘I was supposed to go there this past March.’ It’s OK,” Mr Koval says. “It’s still going to be there.”

And in that respect, we all have something to look forward to.