At Your Service: Paper Trail
September 1, 2008
Founded in 1898, Gracie provided Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Astors with luxurious products, namely the company’s famed hand-painted chinoiserie wallpapers. Today Gracie continues to serve a bespoke clientele that also includes Mandarins, Ritz-Carltons, and the newly opened Venetian Macau Hotel and Resort.
Gracie is based in Manhattan, and has a workshop in China’s Guangdong province, where the handcrafting takes place. The company’s relationship with the workshop has survived the 1949 revolution, a move to Taiwan, and relocation back to the mainland in the 1980s. There, artisans take from 60 to 100 hours to paint one of Gracie’s signature patterns—historical reproductions of some of the earliest Chinese wallpapers—on a single panel.
To stay current, Gracie regularly introduces new collections, and its latest has simpler, modernized patterns and colors that coincide with contemporary design’s more streamlined inclinations. Clients can chose from about 100 set styles, though usually end up with something one-of-a-kind.
"Virtually every order is extremely custom," says Brian Gracie, grandson of the founder. A customization for the Gaylord Hotel in Washington, D.C., involved creating a print that features cherry blossoms, for which the capital is famous. Another client requested a wallpaper to reflect a fledgling interest in fine liquors, resulting in probably the only Gracie wallpaper depicting a squirrel holding a martini glass. "You never know what people are going to ask you to do," Gracie explains. "But we can do it."
Gracie, 212.924.6816, www.graciestudio.com
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