Just Wallpaper mixes bold vibes with home decor in Brookfield
If you’re on the hunt for the right pattern to decorate the walls of your home, look no further than Just Wallpaper in Brookfield.
The wallpaper store’s new location at 9219 Broadway Ave. opened to customers Tuesday. Co-owners Julia Hamilton and Kate Sanderson staff the stop themselves Tuesdays through Saturdays, helping customers who walk in or book appointments browse through the thousands of patterns the store has available to personalize their homes and make their spaces feel lived in.
“Don’t decorate your house gray and white for the future owner. Why are you doing that?” Hamilton said. “You live there. Decorate it for you!”
Aside from helping customers pick out the right wallpaper for them, Hamilton said she and Sanderson are trying to make the process of buying wallpaper — which can sometimes take months, she said — easier.
“One of the things I think that makes us special is that we built a whole computer system, so we catalogued all these books so that we can offer transparent, easy pricing,” she said, referring to the rows and rows of wallpaper pattern books on shelves that line part of the store’s walls.
Part of Just Wallpaper’s goal is to make wallpaper more accessible to customers, Hamilton said, many of whom have little or no knowledge of where to buy wallpaper or how much it should all cost.
“That was the other thing. It’s like, OK, where do you buy the paper? It’s like, oh go find a designer. And then, how much does it cost? And that’s a great question, because they could charge you whatever they wanted,” she said. “I was like, ‘No, no, no. We have to fix this.’”
The original Just Wallpaper first opened in 1982 in Orland Park. The owner chose to retire at the start of 2022, Hamilton said, so she and Sanderson, who then both worked as realtors — Sanderson still does full-time — decided to assume the mantle. They bought up the owner’s books of wallpaper patterns and took on the Just Wallpaper name, even though the store’s current iteration is “not technically connected to” the original, Hamilton said.
“[Sanderson]’s like, ‘Oh, my mom said that woman wants to retire.’ And I turned, and I was like, ‘Let’s buy the store!’” she said. “We just didn’t want to let go of this thing.”
At first, Hamilton said she and Sanderson only planned to do at-home consultations, but their vision for the business shifted in April 2022. That’s when they partnered with Berwyn Shops, an incubator program for small businesses in Berwyn’s Roosevelt Road corridor, and realized how much demand there was for a walk-in wallpaper store.
“A week into getting our LLC, the person from the [Berwyn Development Corporation] was like, ‘Oh, hey, do you want to get involved in this?’ And the next thing you know, we donated wallpaper to all 12 of the shops, and we have a park bench with our logo on it,” Hamilton said. “Then, people were like, ‘Well, we want to come check the books.’”
While Hamilton said she hadn’t envisioned Just Wallpaper having a storefront, she and Sanderson converted a “little, tiny, tiny office space” in Berwyn — the entire building was smaller than the front room of the store’s current space, Hamilton said — into a shop in June 2022 so they could host customers. In January 2023, they had expanded the store’s hours, accepting walk-in customers two days a week. By September 2023, they were open four days a week for walk-ins.
“Most of what we found is that people were coming into the little shop, and they [were] like, ‘Oh my God, thank God I found you. I’ve been on the internet for three months, I’ve spent $100 on samples, and I still haven’t found the [right] wallpaper. Help me!’” Hamilton said. “That’s where it became, like, ‘OK, this is a shop, and we’ve got to find a real store, and this is real.’ We’re solving a little problem, but we’re solving it.”
When it came time for Just Wallpaper to find a new location, Hamilton said the business’s current space felt right as soon as she saw it. She said Brookfield, too, made sense for Just Wallpaper’s new home due to its proximity to Chicago and its central location among the western suburbs.
“One of the things we learned rather quickly is that our clients that were in the city had no problem coming to Berwyn or Brookfield,” Hamilton said. “It’s not that far. It’s no big deal.”
Since the original Just Wallpaper was in Orland Park, “We have a lot of south suburb clients and people that are willing to drive, and they’re not willing to drive into the city,” she said. “We knew our general client is, you know, from Oak Park to LaGrange … We didn’t want to venture far, and Brookfield ended up being the most perfect.”
Hamilton said wallpaper has had a “really big surge” in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve seen it in real estate, but in interior design, [there’s a trend of] just making your space more your own, making it more lived in, making it more personal, and wallpaper’s just like a really easy way to do that,” she said. “It can be a luxury product based on price point, but just like anything else, it can also have a core-basics price point as well.”
While Just Wallpaper is just starting out at its Brookfield location, Hamilton said she and Sanderson have their eyes on the future.
“Not on the immediate horizon, but long-term horizon, I would love — you know, assuming we are thriving in the space, and wallpaper is trending in the way it has been — I would love to open more locations and have it be a retailer for wallpaper,” Hamilton said. “That’s the big dream.”
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