Craftsmanship

Our artisans work around the world to ensure our materials and techniques remain authentically tied to their origins. The handmade silk chinoiserie wallcoverings that established Fromental's reputation are meticulously crafted in Wuxi, China, alongside many of our bold and expressive designs.

Raw silk is sized with natural adhesive to prevent paint bleeding, often brushed with iridescent pearl washes, then backed with rice paper to form the canvas.

For embroidery, we use ultra-fine unspun silk floss, hand-dyed in small batches with thousands of available shades. Embroiderers skillfully blend up to six tones of the same color to achieve subtle gradations and depth.

Our artists are masters of traditional Chinese painting and work in teams to meticulously plan out each room before slowly building up the many layers of detail and colour. To achieve intensity and shade, the artist will blend hues, often using two brushes simultaneously.

Which artist works on which task very much depends on the nature of the design. For example, our head artist, Master Wang, is a virtuoso of ‘unconscious’ painting, a free and spontaneous style practised by only the most skilled artists. This approach lends a unique energy to the finished work; other techniques require more control to capture detail and definition.

Our embroidery studios are located in a district in Suzhou where embroidery has been the main industry for two thousand years. It is a flourishing part of their local culture, and there remains a strong and proud tradition of passing down skills from generation to generation within families.

The technique uses unspun silk floss and involves incredibly fine stitching – 600 stitches for a single blossom. An individual panel can take up to 400 hours to complete. Most of our embroiderers are talented local women who work from their own homes; they collect the painted panels from our studios before taking them away to hand-embroider them. They are always very careful to coordinate with their fellow artists so that the colours and techniques flow beautifully from one panel to the next.

All our printed designs originate as hand-painted, full-scale works of art. We scan the completed paintings in super-high resolution before preparing them for print.

It’s a meticulous process, and we take great care to retain all of the attributes that made the original piece so special: paying particular attention to capturing the nuances in the brushwork that bring so much energy and character to the hand-painted original. Focusing on these minute details is how we make sure our printed products have the same integrity as our handmade.

In our studios, it needn't be a case of ‘either/or.’

We’re passionate about finding the right production method for each project—often combining techniques to achieve the most compelling result. From printed wallpapers hand-finished with painted details or lacquered glazes to metallic accents, this layered approach opens up endless possibilities.

Traditional Chinese painting draws from forms within nature, most commonly birds and flowers, and this rich heritage remains the cornerstone of much of our own design. We believe the natural world provides a unique and inspiring blueprint for beauty. It’s a perennial inspiration at Fromental. We love how the beauty of a golden pheasant or a cherry blossom tree transcends taste and fashion, something we aspire to in all our work.

We cast the net of inspiration wide, ranging freely through the history of art and design, applying what we learn from past masters to propel us into exciting new territories.