A felt wall features at Aesop?s Toronto flagship, designed by superkül. Photo by Ben Rahn / A-Frame
For almost 20 years, Toronto artist and designer Kathryn Walter has created feature wall installations in Canada and the United States through collaborations with architects and interior designers. Since founding FELT Studio in 2000, she has worked almost exclusively with industrial, manufactured felt for its aesthetic, insulating, fire-resistant and sound-absorbent qualities.
Felt is made of pressed wool in a range of thicknesses, densities and tones. Walter came to felt through family history. Her great-grandfather emigrated to Canada from Germany and started a business in the 1890s importing felt from his homeland.
FELT and Bev Koski of Seventh Generation Image-Makers collaborated on this mural in the Centre for Native Child and Family Well Being in Toronto, designed by LGA Architectural Partners. Photo by Ben Rahn / A-Frame In 2002, Bruce Mau Design, which had the signage contract for Walt Disney Concert Hall designed by Gehry Partners in Los Angeles, hired Walter to research and develop prototypes for the donor wall that required names cut from felt. She has since consulted to a number of high-profile architecture firms regarding the use of felt as wallcovering, including Diller Scofidio + Renfro (Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, 2007); OMA (Milstein Hall at Cornell University, 2010) and Kohn Pedersen Fox (School of Law at City University of  New York 2012).
These p...