Wall Jewelry

By Grace Alexander

Forget about your grandmother’s wallpaper festooned with giant cabbage roses or tiny Laura Ashley-style print. Today’s wallpaper is edgy, gorgeous and chic.

And it ain’t just paper any more. Wall coverings come in materials as diverse as fabric (wool, silk, linen) and metal (aluminum, copper). At Chicago’s Maya Romanoff, the country’s largest manufacturer of handcrafted wall coverings, their products are called “extraordinary surfacing materials.” And extraordinary they are, often festooned with such wall jewelry as glass beads, gold leaf and seashells.

“Wall coverings have become all about texture and offer a way to create added visual interest,” says East Hampton interior designer Debra Geller. “Natural materials such as grass cloth combined with metallics add glamour and excitement to a room.” In a surprising recommendation she advises using wall coverings even on ceilings, “the forgotten wall.”

Maya Romanoff, who founded his company in 1969, had a vision of combining ancient artistic techniques with the latest production technologies. The company’s fall collection features a half dozen artisan-executed coverings. Inspired by Japanese crushing techniques, Mesa is a testament to the interaction of dye with the peaks and valleys of creased paper. The Weathered Metals line might be blended with metallic pigments for a shimmering finish, but its subtle design resembles stone. In the True Metals Collection aluminum or copper tiles are inlaid on paper backing and finished with beeswax to retain their appearance over time. Bravado is hand painted in a subtle crosshatch pattern.

Back home in East Hampton artist/designer Elizabeth Dow employs ten artisans in the wall coverings studio behind her eponymous home décor shop. It is here that they toil away designing and manufacturing dozens of collections in a wide range of materials from paperbacked silk to grass cloth.

Known for her neutral palettes, Dow notes that grays, earth tones, lavenders and “unusual blues” are in strong demand. While she acknowledges that “metallic continues to be a constant in fashion and decoration,” she notes that current tastes eschew anything “bright, shiny or brassy.” Instead, her metallic coverings tend toward the blue-greens of “rich patinas.”

As in the Maya Romanoff coverings, Dow’s are also trending toward an organic feel. Among her new patterns is one called Urban Zen, which comes in eight subtle colorways and features wiggly vertical lines that resemble rain streaming down a window. This effect was first generated by snapping a paint-lathered string on paper. That process reflects Dow’s artistic background – she was a painter for many years. “We approach coverings as if building a painting,” she says. “It’s all about line and surface and texture.”

Another new pattern, Jacquard, “has a water color aspect,” while Strata, with its horizontal lines reminiscent of a “shale bank,” is heavily textured – an effect achieved by combing. “That’s what we’re really about: texture, depth and color.” Texture, which is produced by layering mixed media to result in a raised surface, is what gives depth as the light plays off its nooks and crannies.

Dow is quite excited to announce a new eco-friendly high-performance covering that incorporates a high-end residential aesthetic. It is durable enough for commercial applications and beautiful enough to go in the hallway of a typical Hamptons home. It is so new that samples are not yet available in the many showrooms that rep her products worldwide. For now you can only get it at her East Hampton store. While there you might want to check out her huge portfolio of textiles.