Specification insight • Commercial wallcoverings
Designing Walls That Last.
You can’t see the difference on a sample board. The building will.
The Milan architect on designing for longevity — work that lasts physically and emotionally.
Matteo Thun’s rule is a challenge to specify for how a room is lived in, not how it photographs. A wall is chosen in a moment. It is then touched, cleaned and knocked for a decade. Paint, residential wallpaper and commercial wallcoverings are indistinguishable in that first moment, and behave nothing alike after it. Some specifications fail at construction. Others wait two years and fail in front of the client.
Two years, and a dining room.
An Australian golf club house came to us after residential wallpaper failed in its club dining room. Two years, in a room that serves lunch and dinner.
We reproduced the same design as a custom commercial wallcovering. Ten years on, no fault. The design was never the problem. The specification was.
Two ways we cover walls, each fit for a different purpose.
Residential Wallpaper
Thousands of designs, priced to move, easy to hang — and built for homes.
- Endless design range
- 120–150gsm
- Domestic fire standards
- Surface printed — scuffs to white
- Short rolls — 0.53m × 10m, more waste
- Narrow width — visible seams every 0.53m
- Wipe clean only
Commercial Wallcoverings
The design is pressed into the material, not printed onto it. Woven embosses, linens, silks and brushed metallics — why five-star hotels specify them to read as luxury, and why they still read that way after a decade of hands.
- Embossed, not printed
- Colour through the body
- 380–460gsm, fabric-backed
- Group 1 fire rated to AS 5637.1
- Wide width — one 1.3m × 30m roll covers seven, less waste
- Double cut seams, near invisible
- Bleach cleanable
- LRV published per colourway
- Dry strippable
- Ten years and beyond
The Range
Designtex
American design house. Contemporary collections, with PVC-free constructions where the brief calls for them.
The cost conversation is shorter than it looks. Commercial wallcovering costs more on day one and less every year after — one wall specified once, instead of four times. It’s the same reason it’s the lower-impact choice: the greenest wall is the one nobody has to replace. All three are made on clean production lines, with low-emission inks and recycled content.
What we haven’t solved yet?
Commercial ranges are mostly textured plains. Beautifully made, but rarely a picture — which is why designers go looking online in the first place.
The golf club didn’t settle for a compromise, and neither should anyone else. There’s now a faster route to the same place: any artwork, printed to 1400dpi with UV cured inks, on a fire rated commercial base. Next issue.
Every wall looks right on day one.
Specify the one that still does.