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How do you know when a design fits the Blik aesthetic?



What about colors?

Although we do have a color palette on our website, it's actually generated from the materials that we use, because we are our own manufacturers. We can't do anything and everything under the sun or something that just doesn't fit. We don't mass-produce products.

In terms of what colors do really well, it's a home product at the end of the day. Homes are generally made up of things like walls that have wood, furniture made of wood or fabric, carpeting. The tones tend to be earth tones, reds, browns, tans, grays, and we see a lot of those colors making their way to products people buy. But because color is sometimes a scary thing, we do also see another segment of people who really want to bring those colorful pieces that are really about making a statement. It's really split.

How does your background as an architect contribute?

It contributes in a major way. What I learned about design, scale, proportion, environment, the three-dimensional aspect of a room, graphics, and color are a constant help for me on the product side and also the custom side. Close to half of our company is invested in doing very high-level custom work where we will design, manufacture, and install custom projects, so it helps to be able to walk custom clients through how the graphics can impact their space. When you walk around a large environment, you kind of think of things a bit in a narrative form. Maybe there's a story that can be told. Really that stuff we think of as architects takes on an interesting life when we do the kind of environmental graphics that we do.

Do you still design for Blik?

Jerinne and I designed the very first designs, but now we're really so fascinated with the artists that we work with. We could sit around and design stuff all day but our designs wouldn't touch the level of what some of the artists in the world are doing right now.

Why did you decide to go green with your new line of pattern wall tiles?

If it were up to us, we would go green with everything we do immediately. It's just, honestly, we're at the mercy of the industry that manufacture the materials we use. We could invent our own material, but the cost of that is not something we're prepared to do right now.

For two and a half years even before we made the wall tiles, we experimented with recyclable materials, inks, substrates, and adhesives. Although some of that green technology has been around, it's just something that didn't function properly for us. There may have been something you can print out that was green, but the ink that needed to be printed on it wouldn't be green. Or the adhesive wouldn't work properly. They will kind of destroy your wall or fall off your wall. It's only in the past few years that all this stuff came together.

Tell me more about the process of making the pattern wall tiles.

The idea of the tiles themselves came from this concept that we wanted something easy to apply as opposed to wallpaper. We like the idea that it's self-adhesive and repositionable. It's non-toxic. It uses a water-based adhesive, and is made from polyester and wood resin that's free of both phthalates and PVCs (polyvinyl chloride, a type of plastic). It doesn't require messy glue. It comes in tiles of squares or close to squares so people can accent spaces and do things they might not do with wallpaper, which is more of a floor-to-ceiling kind of material. I really see a lot of potential in the patterns. We'll see how it does.

Image: Blik
