Homes
With the right kind of decorations, a home can really shine. Enter Maya Romanoff and his highly lauded wall coverings and designs, largely handmade in Skokie.
Maya’s blooming into a renowned artist and leader of an innovative corporation began in the 1960s, when Maya attended UC Berkeley. From there, he had the opportunity to travel the world, from Africa to Paris, back to the States. At the seminal Woodstock celebration, Maya developed a fascination for tie-dye, utilizing it as a technique to create profitable art. By 1969, he created the Maya Romanoff Corporation, the company whose modern iteration calls Skokie its home.
Originally, Maya worked out of Chicago, primarily with fabrics and the various modes of artistic expression he could make with them. With “The Christo of Chicago,” Maya turned heads figuratively and literally by draping 28 ribbons with bright patterns along the Chicago Sun-Times building toward the Chicago River. Eventually, the Corporation gained renown for its indoor decorations, beginning with wallpaper, but later innovating with wall coverings and wall-surfacing materials designed using natural products. Throughout the corporation’s history, Maya has stressed a strong desire toward keeping green practices and working harmoniously with nature. The designs created often work to bring out the intrinsic beauty of materials, such as mother of pearl, true metals and woods. Maya’s corporation also invented the use of flexiglass on walls and has received not only tremendous business, but also a permanent place in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum for the Beadazzled collection, a series using glass beads for wall coverings.
With so much innovation and inspiration then, it may come as little wonder that the Maya Romanoff Corporation outgrew its 18,500-square-foot facility in Chicago. Its limited indoor workspace and the tribulations of wheeling materials through Chicago alleys proved too cumbersome, especially considering the corporation’s sales have more than doubled since 2005. When given the opportunity for a state-of-the-art facility in Skokie, with multiple loading docks for its own wares and the chance to open up more space for production and innovation in a 40,000-square-foot building, the Maya Romanoff Corporation would not refuse. Chicago had helped Maya accomplish wonders, but the future required more room to think and work; the future required Skokie.
Since April 2008, Maya and his group of dedicated artisans have worked to create even more impressive entries into the world of wall coverings. Their new facility features wall-to-wall decoration with original Maya Romanoff works, specifically placed to foster a more enjoyable and inspiring work atmosphere. All 65 employees can relish the kinds of interesting weathered walls, precious metals, metals interwoven into other materials, bamboo and all the other designs created in-house over the years, not to mention the true metal designs created in partnership with a family in Nepal.
New directions and ideas have sprouted from the mind of Maya Romanoff for decades. With his corporation now idyllically situated in Skokie, innovation in design has found a new home.
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