Showroom

Fromental

Trade account to buy

Hand painted and embroidered silk wallcoverings, made to commission. Founded 2005.

Fromental makes hand painted and hand embroidered wallcoverings, and its New York showroom is a suite in the New York Design Center at 200 Lexington Avenue. The building is open to the public and this showroom sells to the trade.

The work is painted or stitched onto silk and tea paper by hand, panel by panel. Fromental was the first house in the world to hand embroider a wallcovering, in 2005. The embroidery uses unspun silk floss, and Fromental puts the density at 600 stitches for a single blossom, with one panel taking up to 400 hours. The bespoke collections carry names, Chinoiserie, Lumière, Modern Chinois, Roomskins, Ratio and Conversational, and there are collaborations with Sophie Paterson, Lalique and Timothy Corrigan among others. A printed range exists alongside for projects the handwork cannot reach.

What separates this from a wallpaper order is that the panels are drawn to the room rather than repeated across it. On a panoramic Chinoiserie the house moves the composition so birds pass over a doorway and branches meet the architecture, which means the elevation, not just the square footage, has to go in with the order.

The showroom holds trade panel pricing and a loan sample service, and there is a panel calculator for costing a scheme before the drawings are finished.

Handwork sets the programme, not the other way round. A four hundred hour panel cannot be expedited and a room measured after the order goes in is a room the panels will not fit. Get the elevations surveyed and issued at the point the paper is chosen, and treat the delivery date as fixed from that moment rather than as something the trade can compress later.