P eer through the Flavor Paper building’s ground-level glass façade on Pacific Street in Cobble Hill, and you may see a pair of 52-foot-long vacuum tables churning out reams of brightly colored Mylar and pony-skin wallpaper. This is where Jon Sherman, who moved from New Orleans to Brooklyn last summer, designs, fabricates, and markets hand-screened wall coverings for projects ranging from Lenny Kravitz’s house in New Orleans to Frank Gehry’s IAC Building. (“We did holographic wallpaper for their executive garage,” Sherman says. “Clearly prerecession.”) From the outside looking in, you might assume that the rest of the building (designed by Jeff Kovel of Skylab Architecture) is taken up by wallpaper-making machinery. But you would be mistaken. Sherman and a couple of employee-tenants actually live on the floors above, with the boss enjoying a classic bachelor lifestyle (D.J. booth, roof deck, floating beds) inside a retro-futuristic penthouse with the city’s easiest commute.
1. Roof Deck
2. Penthouse
3. Printing Studio
4. Showroom
Photo: Zechariah Vincent
The Living Room
The brass-instrument sculpture over the sofa is by Sherman himself. “I bought all these off eBay, went down to a welder in Park Slope, and stood there and had him weld it,” he says.
Photo: Leigh Davis
The Printing Studio
Passersby on Pacific Street can watch the wallpaper being made. “We were going to put production on the second floor,” says Sherman, “when we realized that this is really the interesting part.”
Photo: Leigh Davis
The Master Bathroom
A little bit nightclub, a little bit commode, with LED lights and walls covered in a Flavor Paper design called Celestial Dragon.
Photo: Leigh Davis
The Master Bedroom
A bachelor lives here: levitating bed, cantilevered side tables, faux-fur walls.
Photo: Leigh Davis
The Fireplace
A monumental gas fireplace is laid with Ann Sacks limestone tiles and illuminated by one of three pyramid-shaped skylights.
Photo: Leigh Davis
The Entrance
A 24-foot stretch of limestone begins as a floor path and ends as a countertop. The kitchen storage and refrigerator are concealed by mock-crocodile-embossed vinyl, which also covers the ceiling.
Photo: Leigh Davis
The Guest Room
Sherman wanted a specific gold tone for the wall paint, so he bought a pigment powder from the same company used by the U.S. Treasury.
Photo: Leigh Davis
The Guest Bathroom
The chevron-patterned interior echoes the guest bedroom’s walls.
Photo: Leigh Davis
D.J. Booth
The wallpaper in the D.J. booth, which contains 2,000 records from Sherman’s 6,000-platters-strong collection, is a photo mural of Big Chief Little Charles of the White Cloud Hunters Mardi Gras Indians. The original photo was taken by Mac Carbonell, who also designed the building’s rooftop meadow with his firm, Verdant Gardens.
Photo: Leigh Davis
