Hand-painted wallcoverings and textiles from Kansas City are sought after by luxury clients around the world, hanging in rarified spaces such as Princess Marie Chantal of Greece’s pied-a-terre in New York to the St. Regis Cairo and a Michelin-star restaurant in Taiwan.
Porter Teleo (@porterteleo on Instagram) is the brainchild of Kansas City designer Bridgett Cochran and Dallas-born Kansas City Art Institute graduate Kelly Porter. The word “teleo” (TEE-lee-o) is the root of teleology, a philosophy of aesthetics that proposes the design concept that forms in nature are determined by their function.
This year, Porter Teleo celebrates its 20th anniversary of creating striking geometric patterns and delicate organic motifs. Like haute couture for homes, their papers, textiles and canvases grace the pages of top glossy design magazines and the homes of celebrities, including Cameron Diaz, Gwen Stefani, Reese Witherspoon, and Demi Lovato. Clients also include professional athletes and politicians who demand non-disclosure agreements, so they can’t be named.
Cochran lives in Brookside, Porter in Prairie Village. They recently spoke with IN Kansas City from their 10,000-square-foot headquarters at 17th and Holmes about their humble beginnings, their international reach, and future trends in design.
What are the historical roots of hand-painted and hand-printed wallpaper?
Cochran: William Morris in England certainly popularized wallpaper in domestic settings.
Porter: And even before that, patterns were hand blocked in Japan and France. I don’t know if it counts as a historical fact, but Bridgett and I were the first people to make wallpaper on an etching press.
When was that?
Porter: Twenty years ago, when we first started out. Our very first line of wallpaper was made on an etching press. It’s called a Takach press, and it’s used to make fine art prints.
And you were the first to do that?
Porter: As far as I know. And not because it was the best way. [Laughs] There’s probably a little bit of crazy in that.
Why did you choose to do it that way?
Porter: It was the way, at the time, that we knew how to make a really interesting mark and to mix really pure colors. We wanted to do something different and really artisanal. It served us well. It got us a lot of attention. Even if it wasn’t the best way to execute our plan. [Laughs]
Cochran: And it really wasn’t, because it maxed out at certain sizes of paper, so it made it have to be these patchworked pieces of paper. But it got a lot of attention in the press, which fueled further growth.
What was your first big break?
Cochran: Very soon after launching, we got coverage in Interior Design magazine. We got a call from the editor when we were in Dallas making some early sales calls. That was incredibly exciting.
Porter: And they gave us five full pages.
Cochran: And then Metropolitan Home did a piece not long after that. Those were good indicators that what we were doing was being well received.
Porter: In those first several months, [designers] were thirsty for what we were showing them. They said, “We needed something fresh. We needed something chic.” It’s not that we didn’t have to work hard to get into those offices, but as soon as we were in front of them it was a natural opening to work with them.
How many jobs did you do in your first year compared to now?
Cochran: It’s been a very slow build. I think we did two big projects [the first year] and little things here and there. We have had substantial growth every year for 20 years.
Porter: Like, between 20 and 30 percent on average.
That’s amazing. How many big projects did you do last year?
Cochran: Probably 150 are, say, more than just a powder room.
How can you do that many?
Porter: We have an awesome team. Our lives have gotten easier over the last few years as our team has grown. We have an amazing production manager. We have an awesome ink manager, who is a colorist and trains a team under her. We have an incredible team of artists in production. We have the best operations director…
Cochran: …who has brought a next level of efficiency and organization to make that growth significantly easier to manage.
What are some international projects you’ve done?
Porter: We recently created very large-scale paintings featuring a 1930s Taiwanese streetscape for Yuen Ji, a Taiwanese cuisine and Tibetan tea restaurant in Taichung, Taiwan, and a series of mountain-scapes using all sepia tones and embodying the beauty and colors of tea. Lillian Wu Studio, out of New York, created the interior and we partnered with her to bring her vision for this to life. The restaurant just won a Michelin star.
We also just finished a project where we created hundreds of custom abstract watercolor canvases for a Rosewood residential tower in Doha, Qatar, and artwork on canvas featuring coastal colors from the Gulf of Naples for a hospitality project in Naples.
How much time do you spend traveling?
Porter: It varies year to year. We have sales representatives now in Los Angeles and New York and Dallas, so Bridgett and I don’t have to go as frequently.
Cochran: Probably eight to ten times a year, to meet with organizations we belong to or to work with our sales representatives.
With your backgrounds being in art and designs, how hard was it to learn the business end of running a company?
Cochran: We had to learn everything. It wasn’t hard at all, because that’s creative also.
Porter: This is the most unbounded creative project you could imagine. It’s not only the patterns and the artwork that we’re putting out there in the world. It’s also the team and the culture you are trying to produce, and scaling in general—we don’t want to grow just to grow. We don’t want to sell more wallpaper just because. We want to make sure our values are always in line with everything we are producing. Everything has to be the absolute best version of a textile that we can produce.
In the United States lately it seems like the model for any business is to start a business and grow it with the sole purpose of selling it and cashing out in ten years.
Porter: Yeah. I know. I keep hearing that from people that are about our age who are selling their businesses. And I’m like, “Really? Is now the right time? Because I just think there is so much more we can do. We’ve got some newer categories so there’s still all this finessing that we can do with those products.
Cochran: It’s an interesting thing to think about, selling your business. Sometimes Kelly and I refer to [Porter Teleo] as our teenager, even though now the teenager is 20. [Laughs] But I love what I do. I love every aspect of it. When you think about not having that any more you start to think about what fills that in your life. There are so many opportunities for growth, not just business, but personal growth. We’re starting to scratch the surface of that conversation, and it’s a big one.
So you wouldn’t just walk away if someone wrote you a really big check?
Porter: No.
Cochran: No. It would be a complicated decision. Especially at this particular moment.
Porter: Yeah. We get to travel to such beautiful places. We get to talk to the most creative people. It would be hard to walk away from that. And also, we have such a strong culture here. I love the fact that the people here are people I enjoy spending time with throughout the day.
I remember in the 70s and 80s my mom was wallpapering every room in the house. And then in the 90s, it changed, and paint became the focus, with accent walls and lipstick-red dining rooms. What is the trend in residential interiors now?
Cochran: One thing we have learned in 20 years is that there is a certain segment of the population that never did stop using wallpaper. In super high-end spaces, wallpaper and textiles did not go away. What went away was generic printed flat patterns that are obviously repeating every 18 to 24 inches. That continues to be less seen in the market.
Porter: But it is a great thing for us to think about because there is always that particular designer who isn’t interested in pattern all over the place or repeats, so we try to create the absolute best version of that as well. We have a collection called Fluid Tones and a collection called The Patinas and those are simply surfaces of Japanese rice papers that are covered with inks that are so far beyond anything that you could get from a printed product, in the way that they are metallic, or they are letting the natural hand and rag of the washi paper come through. So, the question is not just what is the best pattern or artwork but what is the best surface?
Are you ever surprised by which of your collections catch on or don’t catch on?
Cochran: I think we do not ever know how one is going to land. There have been some colorways along the way that …
Porter: … yeah, more with color, for sure. We’ve had some where we were like, “This is wild, but we love it, so we’ll see what happens.”
Cochran: You never know which one is going to rise to the top. The ones that end up on top aren’t always the ones you would have anticipated.
What’s an example of one that surprised you?
Cochran: There’s a colorway in our pattern Floral Graffiti that is called Verte Fonce. It is a grayed-out peacock-y blue background with an acidic green, turquoise, and almost neon coral drippy flower on top. It is a colorway that definitely catches attention. We added it to the line because we liked the reaction we had to it, but anticipated it being more of an inspiration piece than a regularly ordered colorway. It has been a great seller for more than ten years. It’s an example of how we push to define the design realm rather than turning out more of what we think it wants.
How do you decorate your own homes?
Porter: I have warm white stucco on the exterior and then inside slightly cool walls everywhere (Decorator’s White), so it really sets all of the art up well for display. My house is full of books, artwork, and textiles. During graduate school, I traded with other artists to start my collection, and since then have added pieces here and there. I also love Tibetan textiles and have some from my parents’ collection. They have collected art from Japan and Tibet for decades since the Vietnam war.
I try to keep things pretty modern and minimal, although the one place I splurge and resemble a hoarder is with china. I have a huge space to store china. I have collections from my grandmother and great-grandmother along with diaries of who they served dinner to and what china and silver they used. In my dining room, I have PT wallcovering that is a custom palette of warm colors. In the powder room I have Kintsugi in dark green and gold.
Cochran: I’d sum my personal style up as classic but not traditional—lots of serene color with a few bolder pops of color here and there in paintings, pillows, and smaller pieces of furniture. I am a shrewd editor and don’t keep things in my home that I don’t either need or love.
What’s your crystal-ball prediction for what’s going to be the next big thing in wallpaper?
Porter: I don’t know if it’s going to be two years from now or five years or ten years, but I think there will be some kind of backlash against all the AI and automation and emailing with bots, so you don’t know if you are reading something written by a person and it’s not authentic and it lacks a human quality. I think there will be a coming back to the handmade, and things that are rare and things that are unique and made by a human will be even more precious in a few years.
Interview condensed and minimally edited for clarity.