Homegirl London pays homage to Juliet Travers. This company produces designer wallpaper featuring beautifully illustrated works of art with exquisite attention to detail. The Safari Collection captures the characteristics of African wildlife within their natural habitat. You’ll find elephants at a watering hole, leopards hiding in trees and flamingos lined up along the shore at Lake Nakuru in Kenya. These luxury wallpapers use a first class printing technique to achieve the effect of hand printing. I caught up with Juliet Travers to find out more.
Juliet Travers – Nakuru Design
Featuring flamingos lining the shore at Lake Nakuru in Kenya
Meet Juliet Travers
Juliet studied printed textiles for interior furnishings at Edinburgh College of Art. During university holidays, she worked at Fox Linton, Cole and Sons and Colefax and Fowler. One month after graduating from Edinburgh, she secured a sales position at de Gournay in London.
Juliet Travers
This position gave Juliet the experience she needed to eventually launch her own business. She tells me – “It was incredible to work with such a luxurious product and I gained a better understanding of the specific high-end demands for interior decoration on a global scale. After being promoted to sales manager, the position enabled me to work extensively with world-class designers and architects on both commercial and residential projects across Europe, America, Asia and the Middle East.”
Juliet Travers – The Watering Hole Design
Featuring animals enjoying the water
Although she loved her job at de Gournay, Juliet desperately missed being a designer so she got to work on her own collection of wallpapers which she launched at Decorex 2013, last September. She tells me – “After being inspired by de Gournay hand painted wallpapers I realised that there was a niche to create a range of papers that carry that same hand painted effect, but machine print the designs to make them more affordable to the mass market. De Gournay wallpaper is exquisite and always will be and I will never be a competitor. I just wanted to create a product that people could still recognise as a work of art but offer the product at a more reasonable price.”
Juliet Travers – Free Fall Design
Featuring Guinea Fowl feathers
Juliet works from home in central London. She tells me that the upside to being her own boss is being able to enjoy life. Although she admits it is hard work – “It is tough running your own business but if you structure it right, you get to be exactly the person you want to be, when you want to. I love the adventure and knowing that I started drawing on my kitchen table 15 months ago and now, I’m seeing my papers in beautiful residential and commercial spaces all over the world. The buzz is incredible and I’ve learnt a huge amount and continue to do so every day!”
Juliet Travers Collection
Juliet tells me about her debut collection – “Safari, that features African wildlife, was inspired by time spent at my husband’s family farm in Zimbabwe. It was also a theme that had not been used in the industry much and I had to make my stamp and create something new.”
Juliet Travers – Birds of a Feather Design
Featuring Vulturine Guinea Fowl in flocks
Wallpaper designs include elephants at a watering hole, Zebras in groups, Leopards hiding in trees, male African Antelope about to round up the female herd, Flamingos lining the shore at Lake Nakuru in Kenya, Vulturine Guinea Fowl in flocks and Guinea Fowl feathers.
Juliet Travers – Camouflage Design
Featuring Leopards hiding in trees
A major focus for Juliet is the quality – “I was determined to capture the detail in the original artwork and re-create them as wallpaper so they had to be printed using the gravure technique. This is an etching onto a copper cylinder which is a world class method for achieving maximum detail and tone. I strip back all the drawings into layers of tone and colour so that each layer of every design is engraved onto separate cylinders. The use of colour in this collection was essential, so I referenced the Farrow and Ball paint colours to give the designs a classic English twist.”
Juliet Travers – Dazzle Design
Featuring Zebras in groups
For forthcoming designs, Juliet tells me – “The theme behind the company is to focus each collection on a different area of the world. I’m already working on the next series of designs which have a totally new theme, which is exciting. It will hopefully launch at Decorex 2015 and in the mean time, a coordinating fabric collection to the Safari wallpapers will be launching at Decorex later this year.”
Buy Juliet Travers Products
If you love these wallpapers they are available to buy at Juliet Travers. Juliet has a calculator online so you can estimate the numbers of rolls required. Samples are also available free of charge. The Safari wallpaper collection ranges from £99 for a 10m roll with 52cm width to £195 a roll at 68cm width. Prices include shipping to UK delivery addresses, EU delivery is a £12 extra charge and world-wide delivery is £25 for shipping.
Author: Homegirl London. Photographs: Juliet Travers. Thanks: Juliet Travers.
