ROLLOUT 21st Century Wallpaper

ROLLOUT 21st Century
Wallpaper
TEXT • Lisa Baroldi
ART DIRECTION • ROLLOUT
PHOTO • Eric Newby
STYLIST • Carl Abad
It was 1985 when the canary yellow and silver
wallpaper adorning the walls of my grandmother’s
psychedelic kitchen was soaked down and stripped
off in favor of stark white walls. Wallpaper all over the
place came tumbling down in the 80s to make way
for sophisticated minimalism. Later, feature walls in
shades of purple and teal, mimicking the set walls of
hit TV show Friends, popped up in trendy cafés and
apartments everywhere. Wallpaper, especially the
bold and trippy kind, was dead.
Around 2003, wallpaper was resurrected on the
interior design scene. It was during the early years
of this comeback that Anita Modha and Jonathan
Nodrick were given a large-scale printer. The creative
duo invited 30 community-based artists to join their
wallpaper experiment for an exhibition at a small
Vancouver eatery.
Feedback from this first show was so positive
that in 2005 Anita and Jonathan decided to establish ROLLOUT, a custom wallpaper studio based in
Vancouver. ROLLOUT designs and digitally prints
custom wallpapers for an array of clients who want to
transform spaces for decorative, educative, or other
purposes. All ROLLOUT wallpaper is water-based
and printed on demand, making it much greener than
old-school wallpaper.
Examples of ROLLOUT projects are the energetic
backdrops for the Vancouver 2010 Paralympics
Opening Ceremonies; a captivating fuchsia paper
for the Stars Lounge at the Mercedes Benz New
York Fashion Week; an edgy, multi-colored paper
that looks like layers of a thousand tiny paint sample
strips featured on TV show Extreme Makeover: Home
Edition; sheets of collaged sepia photographs of the
family who found a B&B in Yukon; and the life-size,
black-and-white images of prominent figures in
Australian history that line the walls of the Australia’s
Museum of Democracy. Our favorite project to date
is the super layered and super fun “diorama-rama”
shoot for Parlour Magazine’s first home issue. The
background paper is a sample from ROLLOUT’s new
Vancouver series of wallpapers (commemorating
10 years of life in Vancouver for Anita and Jon) that
include drizzling blue skies and bursting pink cherry
blossoms.
ROLLOUT is keen to work on all kinds of projects,
big or small, and enthusiastically welcomes collaboration with like-minded individuals and organizations.
The company’s artist’s series is a testament to the
collaborative sprit at the heart of operations.
Always looking to push the envelope, ROLLOUT
is expanding its product line to incorporate items like
floor tiles and fabrics. Forget minimalism and feature
walls. Make every surface art. ROLLOUT 21st century
style…everywhere.