ROBB REPORT: HOME & STYLE
Design Seen: Hitting the Walls
BY SAMANTHA BROOKS
For last fall’s remaking of Beverly Hills’s Greystone Mansion as a decorator show house, the team at L’Esperance Design (310.385.9400, www.lesperancedesign.com) in West Hollywood, Calif., wanted to contribute something monumental. The firm’s design partners, Daelen Cory and Paul L’Esperance, had a trompe l’oeil effect in mind, but the project presented limitations. “We couldn’t paint or wallpaper [the walls],” says Cory, “so we had to find an alternate method to give them new life.”
Thus, Cory and L’Esperance traveled to Piedmont, Italy, where they had high-resolution photographs taken inside the historic 18th-century Tenuta Berroni estate. The photos were later printed onto 58-by-300-inch pieces of fabric, to fill the Greystone entry’s 850 square feet of wall space. (The ceiling is the result of architectural projection mapping.) Since the Greystone event, L’Esperance has received commissions to use the technique along with other architectural motifs; prices start at about $300 a yard. “It’s a great way to change the entire feel of a room,” says Cory, “without committing to the permanence of intricate architectural moldings.”