Elemente Magazine - design: PUNK UP THE WALL, PUNK IT UP!

PUNK UP THE WALL, PUNK IT UP! 07/22/08

Words :: Sean Starke // Images :: Sean Starke

In the future, your walls will not be white.
Think about it. Interior designers tend to focus on furniture pieces and lighting fixtures, ceiling fans and flooring materials. Yet what better medium to express our design aesthetic than the broad, blank walls that surround a space? Well, one Vancouver design company is putting out the call: the future is graphic and walls are the new canvases. Founded by designers Anita Modha and Jonathan Nodrick, Rollout Custom Wallpaper is creating wallcoverings that are edgy, street-wise and a bit – ahem – off the wall. Despite being in business for less than three years, Modha and Nodrick have quickly become the cool kids of alternative wallcoverings. They’ve already been embraced by the NYC design scene, and boast a client list that includes Microsoft Zune.
Ok, wait a minute. Did I miss something? We’re talking about wallpaper, right? Like many people, I thought wallpaper was for design-challenged kitsch mongers and the over-sixty crowd. As a card carrying Modernist, I tend to be suspicious of even coloured paint. Apparently the tide is changing, however. With patterns, graphics, and even wall-size photographs that are courageously bold, ornate, and colourful, Rollout is breaking all the rules of polite décor.
“We think people are starved for colour and warmth in modern interiors,” argues Modha, “I think it’s exciting to walk into a room and see all this colour and imagery on the walls instead of just cold, gallery-perfect white.” Nodrick agrees. “Interior design has been so minimal for so long, but it doesn’t have to be. You can combine stripes on stripes on plaid, if you want. If you have the confidence in it and it works for your residence or your brand, you can create something really unique.” So the aloofness of modern minimalism is on the way out? “It is for us,” Nodrick replies, “we’re into adding more colour, more texture, more everything.”
If Rollout’s approach seems new, their medium certainly isn’t. Wallpaper is an ancient decorating choice that has been around for, well, let’s just say a long time. The Chinese were gluing rice paper to their walls as far back as 200 BC, and in the late 1800s William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement popularized wallpaper as a form of artistic expression. Morris’ designs were hand painted, and the affordable printed rolls enabled many middle-class homes to be surrounded by art. Sometime around the 1960s and 70s, however, wallpaper took on the cheap chintz feeling of your grandmother’s kitschy kitchen. Since then it has been practically verboten in high design circles as a decorating strategy.

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