From the industrial lofts in Bushwick to the enclaves of Victorian and Queen Anne houses in Ditmas Park, there’s no part of the world quite like Brooklyn. So when Temple, Texas–based Wilsonart, an engineered surfaces company, was looking around for inspiration for a fresh line of laminates, the Wilsonart Design Team and eight select designers from across the country set out to explore this bustling New York City borough. The result of their trip? Inside Brooklyn, Wilsonart’s new collection of 15 patterns added to the Virtual Design Library that will look right at home wherever they are used.
“When designing this collection, I was thinking far beyond tabletops or horizontal surfaces,” explains product designer Andrea Flint, though the collection can certainly liven up such evergreen applications, of course. Flint was full of urban ideas for the patterns, which ultimately resulted from four main themes revolving around Brooklyn: internationally minded Graphic, crafty Artisanal, woodsy Authenticity and the seductively touchable Texture.
The Graphic series takes cues from the street art and multicultural art scene for which the borough is famous. Her favorite pattern in the collection, she confesses, is the large-scale botanical Lush Jungle. “I have it installed in my kitchen on the back of my island.” Its dense expanse of foliage in varied tones of brown and green turns any area into a shady oasis that pairs well with Pantone Color of the Year “Greenery.” Even better, this particular greenery requires no upkeep. “Green walls are amazing but offer no durability,” Flint says. “I’d love to see this installed as wall panels or even in elevator cabs!”
In Brooklyn, those elevator cabs might well be full of artisans — hence the Artisanal theme. “There are many woodworking studios full of emerging and established artists,” Flint says. She pays tribute to them and adds a global touch for Arabesque. “It looks like an artist transformed reclaimed pieces of wood into the pattern.” Its inlaid interlocking hexagons look sharp in faux-crackled white against four colorways: Ash, Olive, Sun Bleached and Blue Sky. “How could you not smile while walking past this on the front desk of a hotel?”
Blues have never looked better, and a moody take on the hue can be found in the Texture group’s Inky Indigo, Tide Pool, and Denim which updates the Japanese shibori technique of resist-dyeing and the color from a Brooklynite’s favorite textile: denim, of course. Varying blue tones combine to form an elegant and dimensional patina, which Flint suggests vertically pairing with gold, rose gold or even brass lighting for hospitality areas in need of a touch of drama.
Flint drew inspiration from another Japanese technique — the charred wood look of shou sugi ban — for the faux-bois Ash from the Authenticity series. A design-forward store could use this for retail fixtures, she suggests, as what she calls the “characters and cathedrals in the wood” would add color and visual interest, whether used in the dark tone Chocolate Ash, the warmer Cottage Ash or the whitewashed Bright Ash.
During their Brooklyn travels, Flint and her team happened to look under a stone and discovered a piece of wood with a glorious set of grains, now embodied in Woven Oak. Currently, popular café and restaurant looks include pressed tin ceilings which inspired Piedra Flor, a design that boasts overlapping botanical circles in a rich charcoal color. Other patterns include Tweedish, an eye-popping take on the classic cloth, with chevron style red lines across a white background; and a highly textured Linear Graphite.
With an ever-expanding collection of fresh and innovative laminate designs, Wilsonart’s Virtual Design Library gives consumers an opportunity to make every space truly unique. “These designs really are ideal offerings for the consumer,” Flint says. “But I want to challenge designers to look at these beautiful and durable surfaces and explore new ways to use it.” In other words, to be as forward-thinking and unique as the borough that inspired them.