Phillip Jeffries

Phillip Jeffries began in a garage in northern New Jersey in 1976, with ten grasscloths and, before that, an unheated warehouse borrowed from Baldwin Steel in Jersey City. The founders, Eric and Susan Bershad, named the firm after their two sons, Philip and Jeffrey — who now run its sales and operations respectively. Half a century later, the firm sells wallcoverings exclusively to the trade from a 60,000-square-foot facility in Fairfield, New Jersey, and from showrooms in five US cities and London, with grasscloth still at the centre of the line.

The firm designs and manufactures wallcoverings across the material categories on which it built its reputation: natural fibres — grasscloth, sisal, hemp, jute — in the tradition it began with; silks; performance vinyls; and hand-painted and specialty coverings. Materials are sourced from artisan producers around the world and consolidated at the Fairfield facility, whose inventory runs to approximately one million yards of finished wallcovering ready for the specifier to draw from.

Two operating disciplines have held for the whole of Phillip Jeffries’s history: what the firm sells, and to whom. On the materials side, the firm has kept natural fibres — grasscloth in particular — at the centre of its identity even as North American wallcovering shifted decisively toward printed vinyl. On the channel side, the firm has never sold direct to the consumer; every yard leaves the Fairfield facility bound for a specifying interior designer or architect. Eric and Susan Bershad’s two sons, Philip and Jeffrey, now hold the vice-presidencies for sales and operations; the firm remains family-owned into its second generation.