In January the New York Times ran an article about the resurgence of wallpaper–not your grandma’s musty floral wall coverings, but modern boutique designs for Dwell readers and their ilk. Fledgling designer Casey Gunschel, a 33-year-old Chicagoan, got a brief mention and a couple of her papers pictured. The same day the Web site for her Palace Papers, which up to that point was attracting two or three visitors a day, got around 4,000 hits, and then Gunschel’s in-box filled up with messages from people wanting to get their hands on patterns like Nevermore, featuring a whorl of ravens in front of a full moon, and Coy, with columns of Japanese-style fish undulating like double helixes. “I get e-mails from people like, ‘Hi guys, can you put me in touch with your marketing person?’” Gunschel says. “Like I’m a real business.”
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Palace Papers (palacepapers.com) is just Gunschel, who was in the middle of moving into her new Logan Square apartment when the story appeared; she operates out of there and a friend’s apartment, which is where her light table is because it wouldn’t fit through the doors of her new place. She founded Palace Papers in 2004, but before the Times piece her client base was a few friends and acquaintances. These days she’s trying to get up to speed on the mundane but essential tasks involved in running a business: “Stuff like shipping costs, who pays for what, setting up a PayPal account, figuring out how things work between my distributor and my manufacturer,” she says. “I’m sure I’m going to make my fair share of mistakes, but hopefully nothing too catastrophic.”
In 1999 she moved back to Chicago, following her fiance, and designed sets for Redmoon Theater while she worked on her own art. Inspired by the highly detailed drawings of Arthur Rackham, a popular children’s book artist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Gunschel did a lot of etchings, drawings, and paintings that stressed anatomical precision and a dark mood, like the images of creepy skeletons of birdlike creatures and twisted, blank-eyed horses mounted on pieces of wood or old maps that she showed at Ann Nathan and other venues.
“It’s hard to figure out where to sell wallpaper,” she says. “Either you go to the Merchandise Mart and the interior designer buys it, or you go to the paint store, which has a lot of crappy, cheap paper. There’s nothing in between.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Paul L. Merideth.
