If you think about wallpaper at all—which a lot of design people don’t anymore—you think of two things: dumpy historical reproductions, or those flocked-and-foiled seventies patterns that produce nightmares. Erase those clichés from your mind with a visit to Boerum Hill’s Flavor Paper, whose products line the Tribeca Steve Madden boutique and the upcoming Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg. At the Brooklyn showroom, you can browse hand-screened and digital-printed wallpapers that come in genuinely hip designs: fishnet, farmers’ market, even kitschy woodgrain. Visitors can also commission their own, with prices starting at $150 per roll for hand-screened paper or $7 per square foot for digital output. But how is started the company ?
“Founded on the Oregon coast by a guy named Ted, this small handscreened wallpaper company flourished in the Age of Aquarius. Many years later, some young designers seeking striking wallcoverings discovered Ted’s greatness- just days before the designs and equipment were to be destroyed. Knowing what had to be done, these young designers headed west to save Ted’s legacy. Relocated to the Bywater District of New Orleans, Flavor Paper continued to print using Ted’s traditional printing methods and vacuum table, but with greatly increased accuracy and detail. Our Flavor Lab is now located in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and is home to Flavor Paper’s design and screenprinting operations. Two re-engineered versions of Ted’s original table are the centerpiece of the Lab and the backbone of our wallpaper printing operation.
To support our hand screened printing process, the Flavor Lab houses a darkroom, screen etching equipment, and an ink room where we custom mix all of our colors. Printing becomes street art as the front windows allow pedestrians to watch the process happen in the massive overhead mirrors. The Flavor Paper showroom is located on the second floor and offers clients a unique way to view wallpaper and experience the bespoke offerings that make Flavor Paper the only place to purchase fine wallpaper in the city of New York. The New Orleans Flavor Paper location is currently being transformed into the Flavor Fabric facility, but more to follow on that later”
Peer through the Flavor Paper building’s ground-level glass façade on Pacific Street in Cobble Hill, and you may see a pair of 52-foot-long vacuum tables churning out reams of brightly colored Mylar and pony-skin wallpaper. This is where Jon Sherman, who moved from New Orleans to Brooklyn last summer, designs, fabricates, and markets hand-screened wall coverings for projects ranging from Lenny Kravitz’s house in New Orleans to Frank Gehry’s IAC Building. (“We did holographic wallpaper for their executive garage,” Sherman says. “Clearly prerecession.”)
From the outside looking in, you might assume that the rest of the building (designed by Jeff Kovel of Skylab Architecture) is taken up by wallpaper-making machinery. But you would be mistaken. Sherman and a couple of employee-tenants actually live on the floors above, with the boss enjoying a classic bachelor lifestyle (D.J. booth, roof deck, floating beds) inside a retro-futuristic penthouse with the city’s easiest commute. ( By Wendy Goodman from www.nymag.com ) For more information we invite you to visit the website below the pictures that shows you some examples of their work.
