Big Mountain Imaging: Customizing Luxury

As part of Philadelphia magazine?s Design Home 2006?in which the publication coordinated the construction of a 9000-sq ft customized home boasting ?all the luxuries you can imagine??Big Mountain Imaging (BMI) donated its services to create and print custom digital wallpaper for six rooms in the house.

Working with Alex Cole Interiors, BMI art director Lesha Meyer developed themes for each room using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator: Tuscan and contemporary for the game room; a faux hammered-copper ceiling in the study; sepia-tone countryside design in the powder room; Jack ?n? Jill bedrooms with pink/silver horizontal stripes in one bedroom and a fashion-designer theme in the other; and the adjoining bathroom combines the themes of both bedrooms. Proofs of the final designs were delivered as PDFs for approval; final color approval required hard-copy proofs.

?One of our biggest challenges for this job was helping the interior designers visualize the power of printing an image for the walls,? says Fred Ciolorito, BMI president.

Production
BMI output the 1600 sq ft of wallpaper on its EFI Vutek UltraVu 2360 and UltraVu II 5330 printers. The graphics were printed onto several different textures of Korographics digital wallpaper: Trade Route texture was used in the powder room, Mongahello in the Tuscan-themed gaming room, Abacco Beach in the study and Jack ?n? Jill suite, and Glassed Out in Jill?s Fashion room.

The job took 20 hr to print, and another 2 hr to coat with Ronan Matte clearcoat using a Neschen AccuCoat 1600 laminator. The game-room wallcovering was highly textured and had to be hand-coated. The wallcovering install was handled by paper-hanging professionals; the graphics were coated with a clay-based vinyl adhesive and then hung. Install took 3 days. Four additional pieces of art were hand drawn by Meyer. These were scanned on BMI?s Epson 10000 scanner, printed via an HP Designjet 5000 onto Ultraflex Artex Canvas, clearcoated, and hung.

Comment
?After having to redo the design of the powder room, we learned to produce not only full proofs for approval, but also to print out a section at 100% so the interior designers could appreciate the scale and impact of the graphics in the room,? says Ciolorito.

Client
Philadelphia magazine?s Design Home 2006

The Players
Alex Cole Interiors (www.alexcoleinteriors.com), Big Mountain Imaging (www.bigmountain.com)

Tools & Supplies
EFI Vutek UltraVu 2360 and UltraVu II 5330; Korographics wallpaper; Neschen AccuCoat 1600 laminator, Ronan Matte clearcoat.