Specification insight • Digital & custom prints
One supplier. Many hats.
One is backlit across a hotel lobby.
One survives being scrubbed with antiseptic.
Clients want a scheme that exists nowhere else and a catalogue, by definition, is somewhere else.
Design has moved
Bespoke, custom, made to order. Easy to specify, harder to source, because most commercial wallcovering is texture without image: woven embosses, linens, brushed metallics, built to last a decade in colours rather than pictures. Beautiful. Not a picture.
So the hunt begins. Folder after folder, looking for the one that’s closest — and closest is usually where it lands. A standard range sets the outcome before the design does.
W Melbourne, with Hachem
Make it pop
231 unique panels. Not one repeat
A Melbourne laneway rebuilt in a hotel lobby, and above it Rus Kitchin’s canopy of Australian flora and fauna over Hosier Lane. Backlit — which is the hard part, because light passing through a printed image washes the colour out of it.
Printed in reverse onto clear film, so the image is read through it. Double hit, twice the ink density, so the colour holds when lit from behind. Mounted to acrylic and labelled panel by panel.
A guest walks in and knows exactly which city they’re standing in.
Epworth Richmond, with Silver Thomas Hanley
Make it tough
It passed
A gum leaf for the surgical theatres. Custom traditional print under a Tedlar overlay — the volume justified commissioning the emboss as well as the artwork, so the texture exists nowhere else.
Then the Betadine test. Antiseptic thrown at the wall, left a week, scrubbed off. It passed.
But the gum leaf isn’t decorative. Microsurgeons work for hours at close focus. The pattern gives them something to look up at, at distance, and let their eyes reset before returning to the millimetre.
A wall specified for the surgeon’s eyes, not the visitor’s.
So much more than a print shop
A print shop has one machine and one answer. Newmor has several, and picks.
Roller printing for repeats. Digital where the run doesn’t justify a cylinder. Custom traditional when the project is big enough to own its own texture. And when a brief outruns all three, they commission it out — as they did for the W.
The studio is part of it. Recolour a range to a brand palette, rescale a pattern until it reads as texture across a lobby, or start from your file. They’re in Wales. Send it at the end of your day; it’s been worked on before the next one starts.
The detail
Surfaces — walls, glass, acrylic, doors, joinery
Bases — smooth, embossed and metallic wallcoverings, clear and frosted films, Belbien print bases
Methods — roller print, digital, custom traditional
Minimums — 1 lm stocked · 1m² digital · 500 lm custom traditional
Can you print onto texture?
Yes. Embossed and metallic bases, not just smooth stock — most print shops can only offer smooth.
What artwork do you need?
300dpi is enough. We reproduce to 1400dpi.
Is it still commercial grade?
Fire rated, durable, cleanable. Same bases as the stocked range.
When does custom traditional make sense?
From 500 lm, where you commission the colour and the emboss, not just the image.
Where do I start?
Send us the idea. That’s the process.
Got a project that doesn’t fit the folder?
From the blog
Two hundred years of wanting this
The pictured wall isn’t new. From the early 1800s French workshops printed panoramic scenes that ran unbroken around an entire room — every colour cut into its own woodblock, hundreds to a single scene. It was a product for palaces.
Every wall looks right on day one.
Specify the one that still does.
Next issue
Digital is the machine route to the pictured wall. There’s an older one, still painted by hand in Milan.