Maya Romanoff: Glass Beads, Gold Leaf and the Wall as Artwork

How a Woodstock tie-dyer built America's largest handcrafted wallcovering studio, and why designers still specify it fifty-five years on.

Most luxury wallcovering houses trace their story back through European mills and a century of archives. Maya Romanoff's begins at a music festival in upstate New York in 1969, with a young man experimenting with dyes and resist techniques, and it has stayed defiantly hand-made ever since.

The company he founded that same year is now the largest manufacturer of handcrafted wallcoverings in the United States, still producing in its Chicago studio, still working with materials that no automated process could handle: genuine glass beads, gold leaf, mother of pearl, wood veneer, hand stitching.

01From tie-dye to couture to walls

Maya Romanoff's early work was in cloth rather than wallcovering. What began with tie-dyed T-shirts became suits, dresses and caftans, and by the early 1970s a couture line stocked by I. Magnin and Henri Bendel, with custom pieces made for Roger Daltrey, Elton John and Julie Christie.

He drew the company's original logo himself, two entwined lotus flowers standing for unity in all things. Collaboration was built into the business from the start, and it is still how the studio works.

The scale of ambition showed early. In 1988 the studio installed Bess' Sunrise on the former Sun-Times Building in Chicago, described as the largest hand-dyed artwork in the world: twenty-eight tie-dyed canvas panels, each six feet wide and one hundred and twenty feet long, hung from a seven-storey rooftop down to the river, moving in the wind so the sunrise effect played across the water.

That same year Joyce joined as head of sales, took on progressively more of the business so that Maya could concentrate on the making, and is today the company's chief executive.

02The Chicago studio

The workshop is deliberately old-fashioned in its layout, closer to an eighteenth-century studio than a factory floor: long painting tables, stencils, drying racks, rolls of paper. Artisans work with paints, dyes and processes that are slow by any commercial standard.

The founding ethos was a combination of respect for raw materials and a willingness to experiment with them, and the studio still describes its approach as listening to what a material wants to become. Maya's guiding instruction to the company was simply to make every wall beautiful.

Visitors to the Chicago studio tend to leave saying the same thing: they did not know this kind of handwork was still being done in America.

03The signature materials

Maya Romanoff is not a pattern house. It is a materials house, and the collections are organised around what a surface is made of rather than what is printed on it.

Alongside the handcrafted lines sits a serious contract offer. The Cornerstone Type II vinyls take 20 oz vinyl and work it into convincing interpretations of linen, concrete, wood veneer and grasscloth across four collections, eighteen textures and close to one hundred and eighty colourways, made in the USA and cleanable with disinfecting wipes or diluted bleach. It is the same design intelligence applied to a surface that has to survive a hotel corridor.

04The Rockwell collaboration

In 2007 the studio began working with the architect and designer David Rockwell, producing a collection that won awards and that still reads as contemporary. Stitched reinterpreted the studio's Weathered Walls with handwork-inspired detail. Blanket was felt-based with linear stitching, giving both acoustic softness and structure. Groove-V and Stitched II brought dimensional texture to 54 inch vinyls for high-traffic use. Cozy took heathered wool and worked it with metallic foil and dimensional ink.

The collaboration is a useful illustration of how the company operates. An outside designer brings an idea, the studio works out how to make it by hand, and the result usually ends up in both a handcrafted and a hardworking commercial version.

05Ananda, the Fall 2026 collection

Announced in August 2026, Ananda takes its name from the Sanskrit word for a deep inner contentment, and pairs two wallcoverings built on very different logic.

Zen Kanso is the handcrafted half. Tiny glass beads are encapsulated in a resilient compound, hand-raked vertically across a durable non-woven ground, then coloured, all in the Chicago studio. The surface catches and returns light as you move past it, which is difficult to photograph and immediately obvious in a room. It is designed to sit alongside its sister covering, Zen Garden.

Tenona II is the performance half. Drawing on centuries-old Japanese paper weaving, it reinterprets grasscloth as a Type II vinyl made in the USA, with a soft basketweave texture in twelve natural colourways. It gives commercial interiors the look of a natural fibre with the durability and cleanability a specification demands.

Joyce Romanoff has framed the collection around designing spaces that encourage calm and connection, and the pairing makes the point neatly: the same idea, executed once by hand for the residential project and once in vinyl for the hotel.

06Specifying Maya Romanoff

Several things are worth knowing before you put it on a schedule.

• Seams are part of the material. On Beadazzled, seam visibility is inherent rather than a defect. Panel joints read as joints. Plan the wall around them, and set the client's expectation at sample stage rather than at handover.
• Type II 54 inch vinyls are the contract workhorses, sold in wide width and calculated by the linear metre rather than by the roll. Our guide on how much wallpaper you need covers that calculation.
• Marine certification. A number of references carry IMO wheelmark approval, which puts them into yacht and passenger vessel work where most decorative wallcoverings cannot go. Our fire safety regulations guide explains what that approval means.
• Handcrafted means variation. Colour and texture will differ between panels on the hand-made lines. That is the product, not a fault, and it is why ordering the whole job in one batch matters more here than almost anywhere else.
• Sustainability credentials are unusually specific: FSC certified paper and wood veneer, PVC free options, recycled content, rapidly renewable materials, and a large proportion made in America.
• Custom work. The studio's Atelier service produces original wallcoverings designed for individual projects, which is worth knowing for a scheme that needs something that does not exist yet.

07Where it belongs

Maya Romanoff is at its best where a wall is meant to be the event. A dining room, a powder room, the wall behind a bed, a hotel lobby, a private lift lobby, a yacht saloon. Beadazzled and Mother of Pearl in particular reward low, raking light, so think about how a room is lit before committing.

It is a poor fit where you want a quiet backdrop, and an expensive way to achieve one. It also asks for a good installer. These are not papers to hand to a general decorator with a bucket of paste, and the studio publishes installation guidance for a reason.

Frequently asked questions