Maya Romanoff, whose wall coverings became standards of quality and taste in the store design industry, died last week in Northbrook, Ill. He was 72.
He was reportedly signing advance copies of a soon-to-be-published book about his life when he felt pain and was taken to the hospital.
Romanoff had been living with Parkinson’s Disease for 23 years.
Born in Chicago, Romanoff early pursued an interest in art. In 1969, he was further influenced by two trips he took during the same year.
A trip to India inspired in him a never-ending passion for colorful fabrics and swirling patterns. (It also inspired Robert Romanoff to change his name to Maya.)
Later that year, at Woodstock (where his then-wife had a contract with the concert promoters to bake and sell chocolate cakes), he was exposed to tie dying. He bought 180 T-shirts, colored them and sold them all at a Rolling Stones concert in Florida.
While he kept one foot very firmly in the art world – some of his dyed leather and silk is found in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago – he also became a commercial success. The Maya Romanoff Corp., based in suburban Skokie, Ill., employs 70 people and does more than $15 million a year in sales.
His textiles, tapestries, upholstered furniture, wall hangings and floor coverings were the standard of high-design retail installations. He credited Jack Lenor Larsen, the well-known textile designer and weaver, for helping him move from enveloping fabric environments to wall coverings.
In his native Chicago, his large-scale installations of hand-dyed fabric draped the old Sun-Times Building in 1988, and he was commissioned to create the main stage curtain at the Harris Theater of Music and Dance at Millennium Park. In 1982, the Chicago Cultural Center presented an exhibition of his work, “Maya Romanoff: Textile Impressionist.”
His Chicago and New York showrooms and occasional exhibit booths were regular stops for commercial designers visiting GlobalShop, all the iterations of the New York retail design shows, NeoCon in Chicago, the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York and various trade shows for the hospitality industry, as well, another sector in which his artistic, high-quality products found an eager home.
Mary Scoviak, executive editor of Boutique Design – VMSD’s sister publication covering the hospitality industry – wrote this tender remembrance on the Boutique Design web site.