The Story of River Bed
March 27 2017
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Since all of our products at Maya Romanoff are handmade, the process by which they turn from fledgling idea or random experiment into a viable product is anything but standardized. While some of our collections, like Bravado, begin through pure trial-and-error others, like Mesa, are inspired by a desire to refresh techniques we’ve used in the past.
Many of our collections, however, start as the byproduct of our custom work; a process that often begins with a company or designer sending in swatches, or tear-outs, or textures that they’d like to mimic in some way. Turning those samples into a beautiful wallcovering is an open-ended process that leaves plenty of room for trial and interpretation. Our production team tries quite a few designs before a winner is selected. It was through this trial period that we stumbled upon what has become one of our most popular collections, River Bed.
The creation of the collection began with a swatch from a company for whom we’d been working on a custom order. As our lead product designer, Bopha Ly, was developing samples, she started experimenting with materials like ghesso, venetian plaster, and clay paper...eventually realizing that combining some of these materials with paint and metallic pigment created a small-scale puddling effect, which was also quite beautiful. The most interesting aspect of the design, however, was the ring on the very outer edge of each round puddle formed by the metallic pigment, giving the print incredible depth and an ethereal quality.
After perfecting the technical process, which required reducing the product’s drying process from multiple days to mere hours, we launched River Bed in nine colorways in 2013.
Want to see more about the process behind River Bed? Watch it in the making, below.
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