Printed Fabric Screens for a Japanese Restaurant at Four Seasons
A Japanese restaurant at Four Seasons needed the fabric in its screens and ceiling to carry a single indigo floral pattern, on linen, at architectural scale.
Sun Studio printed the panels direct — chrysanthemums, trailing vines and leaves in indigo and near-black on natural linen — for the shoji-style window screens and the coffered ceiling above the dining room.
Project facts
- Client
- Four Seasons
- Application
- Japanese restaurant: window screens and ceiling panels
- Material
- Natural linen
- Printing service
- Fabric and textile printing
- Design
- Indigo floral pattern, printed panel by panel to a schedule
- Production
- Direct UV printing onto the fabric
The requirement
A shoji screen is backlit, and backlighting is unforgiving. Anything uneven in the ink shows as a shadow the moment a light goes on behind the panel.
The pattern also had to run across dozens of separate panels — windows and ceiling coffers of different sizes — and still read as one continuous design in a room where you can see several at once.
What we did
Each panel was printed to its own dimensions rather than cut from a printed roll, so the pattern sits correctly inside every frame instead of being trimmed wherever the sheet happened to end.
The ink was laid to keep the weave visible. On linen that matters: the point of printing onto a natural cloth is that it still looks like cloth, and a heavy flood of ink flattens it into something that could be any material.
Because the panels are backlit, ink coverage was kept even across the unprinted ground as well as the pattern — the pale areas are what the light comes through.
Technical considerations
Textile is a soft, absorbent, moving substrate, which is the opposite of the rigid work a flatbed usually handles. The cloth is held flat on the bed so the weave does not shift mid-pass and throw the register out.
LED-UV curing is cold, so the linen is not scorched or stiffened by heat as it is printed.
The outcome
A dining room where the pattern runs from the window screens up into the ceiling, printed on the cloth itself and still reading as linen when it is lit from behind.