Walk into any notable hospitality space, corporate headquarters, or high-end residential project today, and you will likely encounter a wall that does something. Not just covers a surface, but communicates intent, establishes atmosphere, and carries a story. Behind a growing number of those walls is Astek, a Los Angeles-based wallcovering company that has built its reputation at the intersection of large-format digital printing, original design, and custom fabrication.
Founded with a focus on serving professional designers, architects, and developers, Astek operates as a B2B brand with showrooms in both Los Angeles and New York. Their client base spans hotels, restaurants, retail environments, corporate campuses, and large-scale residential developments. What distinguishes them from conventional wallcovering suppliers is not just their product range but also the process, specifically the degree to which design, production, and quality control happen under one roof.
A well-designed wall does more than cover a surface: it communicates intent, shapes atmosphere, and tells a story within the space.
A Studio Built Around Custom Work
The case for custom wallcoverings in architectural projects is straightforward: spec work rarely accounts for the specific proportions, adjacencies, and lighting conditions of a real space. Off-the-shelf patterns repeat. They may not align with millwork reveals or accommodate irregular room geometry. Astek was built around solving this problem.
Their in-house design studio collaborates directly with clients from concept through production. Project managers and designers work alongside specifiers to confirm that whatever vision exists on a rendering or mood board translates accurately to the final printed substrate. Digital proofs and physical samples move back and forth before any final production run begins, which is a meaningful safeguard in projects where a single wallcovering decision might affect thousands of square feet.
The production side relies on a fleet of large-format UV digital printers capable of achieving the resolution and color fidelity that earlier generations of wallcovering simply could not. This technical capability allows Astek to take a client’s original artwork, a designer’s painting, a photograph, or a completely original pattern developed in-house and render it at architectural scale without loss of quality.
Collections That Speak to Designers
Alongside custom work, Astek maintains a portfolio of original collections that reflect a genuine design perspective. Their recent Eterna Nouveau collection takes Art Nouveau as its starting point, not as a pastiche but as a living thread that first emerged in the early 1900s, was revived in the 1960s, and is now reinterpreted for contemporary interiors. Sweeping botanical forms, intricate line work, and mural-scale compositions define the collection. It reads as both historically rooted and entirely current.
The Ascend collection, developed in collaboration with designer Jill Malek, draws from mountain terrain and desert plateaus. The rerelease incorporates spot gloss printing, which adds dimensional depth and surface quality that photographs never fully capture. Standing in front of a spot-gloss mural, light hits differently depending on angle and time of day. That kind of responsiveness to the environment is exactly what specifiers look for in high-end hospitality and retail contexts.
Resonance, an original painted mural collection, captures the movement and spontaneity of expressive brushwork at HD scale. It was recognized as a finalist in the HD Awards, which reflects its standing within the hospitality design community.
Beyond these signature collections, Astek organizes its digital range into focused categories: Botanical, Geometric, Faux Finish, Illustrative, Textural, and Art Nouveau. Each functions as a curated design library, making specification faster and more purposeful for design teams working against tight project timelines.
Substrates That Match the Project
Material selection is where many wallcovering decisions get made in practice. A hotel corridor has different demands than a residential dining room. A healthcare environment needs different certifications than a luxury retail boutique. Astek’s substrate portfolio spans naturals, contract vinyl, and specialty digitally-printed materials, giving specifiers the flexibility to match surface performance to project requirements without sacrificing design intent.
Contract vinyl is a category where commercial projects have non-negotiable needs: cleanability, durability, fire ratings, and seam performance under heavy traffic conditions. Astek’s contract-grade offerings are engineered to meet those standards while carrying the design quality the rest of their portfolio is built around. Naturals bring warmth and texture to projects where acoustics, tactility, or biophilic design considerations are priorities.
Standard wallcoverings rarely account for the real conditions of a space; its proportions, adjacencies, and lighting, which is why custom solutions often lead to better architectural outcomes.
The Terry Crews Collaboration
One of the more unexpected directions in Astek’s recent work is their collaboration with actor and artist Terry Crews, who maintains a serious visual art practice outside of his public profile.
The collaboration brought original artwork directly into a wallcovering format, which speaks to a broader shift in how commercial design is approaching surface decoration: less commodity, more authorship.
The partnership positioned Astek as a company willing to operate at the intersection of fine art, pop culture, and interior architecture.
Sustainability as Operational Standard
Astek is a member of several professional organizations, including ASID, IIDA, and the Wallcoverings Association, and has made sustainability a measurable commitment rather than a brand talking point. They work within the framework of responsible material sourcing and production practices, and their participation in environmental certification bodies reflects accountability to the design and construction community’s growing expectations around specification transparency.
For architects and designers working on projects that require material health documentation, environmental product declarations, or alignment with green building certifications, Astek’s organizational memberships provide the verification points required for due diligence.
What Specifiers Actually Need
The practical reality of specifying wallcoverings for a large commercial project involves a long chain of decisions, approvals, and coordination. A supplier that can handle the full chain, from initial design through sampling, revision, quality-checked production, and delivery, reduces the number of handoffs where things go wrong.
Astek’s project management model is structured around that reality. Their team functions as an ongoing partner rather than a transaction processor. Returning clients work directly with the same representatives and project managers who know the project history, which matters on multi-phase developments or repeat hospitality clients building a consistent aesthetic across multiple properties.
Their Los Angeles headquarters operates Monday through Saturday, and their New York showroom at 200 Lexington Avenue serves the dense specifier community in the northeast. Both points of contact support the professional workflows of studios and developers who need accurate answers, physical samples, and reliable lead-time estimates.
The Broader Shift in Surface Design
Walls are not neutral surfaces; they are fundamental elements that shape how a space is perceived, experienced, and remembered.
Walls are not neutral. They are one of the largest continuous surfaces in any built environment, and what happens on them has a measurable effect on how a space feels, how it photographs, how it ages, and what it communicates about the institution or brand occupying it.
Digital printing technology has removed the barriers that once limited wallcovering to repeating patterns and limited colorways. Custom scale murals, original artwork, photographic imagery, and complex surface effects are all accessible at production volumes that meet the requirements of commercial projects. The question is no longer whether a design idea is technically achievable. It is whether the supplier behind it has the design capability, production infrastructure, and depth in project management to deliver it reliably.
Astek has built its track record in Los Angeles on exactly that combination. For architects and designers working across hospitality, commercial, and high-end residential sectors, they represent one of the more complete answers in the wallcovering category to the question of what a wall can actually do.
See Astek’s full collection and custom design services at astek.com.
