Printing for the Winelands

Estates, schools and guest houses an hour outside Cape Town. What we have printed in the Winelands, and how a panorama that long is actually made.

A good deal of our work sits between Stellenbosch, Paarl and Franschhoek, and it tends to be the same brief in different buildings: a long wall, a landscape, and a room that people move through rather than sit in.

A corridor in a Stellenbosch school is the clearest example in our portfolio. A winelands panorama runs the length of it, mountains and vineyards above the dado line, and it was printed as one piece and hung on site. It is the sort of wall that photographs badly and works beautifully, because you read it while walking.

The technical part of a long wall is worth understanding before you brief one. We print three metres wide, and the length is not the constraint people assume it is. A corridor mural is long and short, so it comes as a single seamless piece. It is the tall walls, over three metres in both directions, that need joining, which is why a double-volume entrance is a different conversation from a twelve metre passage.

The other Winelands constraint is the buildings themselves. Cape Dutch walls are rarely flat and rarely square, and the plaster texture shows through paper because paper is thin. That is not a problem to be solved, it is a thing to decide about: on a heavy texture, a photographic mural fights the wall and a looser painted design settles into it.

We are in Observatory, so the Winelands is an hour each way and we do it often. Send the wall dimensions and a photograph and we will come back with what it costs and whether it joins.