Wallpaper that has to survive a restaurant

A dining room is a hard place to put paper on a wall. What we print for restaurants, and why the finish matters more than the pattern.

A restaurant wall gets touched. Chairs go back against it, service trolleys clip it, and somebody wipes it down at the end of every night. That is a different job from a wall in a bedroom, and it is the reason the finish matters more than the pattern when the room is a working one.

We print with UV cured resin inks. The result is durable, it is washable, and it comes off cleanly when the room is next redone. For a dining room that combination is the whole argument: a mural can be as bold as the designer wants because keeping it clean is not the customer's problem.

Two of the rooms in our portfolio show the range of it. Nobu in Cape Town is restrained, dark and textural, the kind of wall that reads as a material rather than as a picture. In Die Sop in Swellendam is the opposite, a bold geometric mural behind the fireplace that the room is built around.

Both were printed the same way.

The practical part is easier than most people expect. We print three metres wide, so most feature walls arrive as one seamless piece with no join to line up on site. A wall only needs joining when it is over three metres in both directions, which is rare in a dining room and common in a double volume.

If you are specifying for a restaurant, a hotel or a tasting room, send us the wall dimensions and a photograph. We will tell you whether it comes as one piece, and we will show you the design on your own wall before anything is printed.