Tempaper Brand Guidelines: Twin Sisters, Brick (New Jersey) & Peel-and-Stick Wallpaper

An idea from a production set, a business in New Jersey.

Tempaper is a New Jersey wallpaper company built around one idea: wallpaper that comes off as easily as it goes up. New Jersey Monthly reported in March 2023 that the twin sisters Jennifer Matthews and Julia Biancella Au, both New Jersey natives, became business partners in 2008, when they launched Tempaper. The magazine described it as a family-owned business in Brick, in Ocean County, and wrote that the business “revolutionized wallpaper by making it readily removable without damaging walls.”

The company tells its own origin story in similar terms. Its website says the story began on a New York City production set in 2005: faced with the trouble of putting up and taking down traditional wallpaper, the founders saw a gap, and the idea for removable, self-adhesive wallpaper followed. The company describes itself as family-founded and says it began in 2008 with “the invention of peel and stick wallpaper”; that is the company’s own claim, and it is given here as such.

In Forbes in April 2022, the interior-design writer Amanda Lauren named Jennifer Matthews as Tempaper’s co-founder and chief creative officer. The same article described the product as removable wallpaper, “sometimes called ‘peel and stick’ or ‘self-adhesive’ wallpaper.”

In 2023, for its fifteenth anniversary, the company took a new name, Tempaper & Co., and relaunched its website, New Jersey Monthly reported. The magazine listed new ventures alongside the wallpaper, including wall decals, murals and vinyl floor mats. The company’s own site now signs itself “Tempaper & Co.” and calls the business “a privately held company proudly produced in the USA.”

Removable paper, murals and grasscloth.

Tempaper’s core product is peel-and-stick wallpaper: a self-adhesive paper that is positioned on the wall, smoothed down and later peeled away. In the question-and-answer section of its 2023 profile, New Jersey Monthly quoted the company as saying that the word “temporary” describes how the product peels off, “not when,” and that customers use it as a long-term or short-term choice. According to the same interview, customers use it for accent walls, bookcase linings, stair risers and ceilings, and it has been used for backdrops on film and television production sets, for photography, in retail displays, at trade show booths and at wedding venues.

The range has widened beyond self-adhesive paper. The company’s website now sorts its catalogue into peel-and-stick wallpaper, unpasted wallpaper, peel-and-stick wall murals, authentic grasscloth and paperweave, with a custom service through which, the company says, customers can print their own pattern or recolour any of its more than 300 designs. It says it works with master printers, engravers, designers and colourists who mix by hand.

Style is the other half of the business. The company told New Jersey Monthly in 2023 that the brand has always drawn on vintage looks, especially its chinoiserie collections, and that its designs leaned into past art movements paired with contemporary colour. Its website groups murals under headings such as chinoiserie, landscape and kids.

Collaborations carry much of the brand’s public profile. Forbes listed partners including The Novogratz, Cynthia Rowley, Bobby Berk and Genevieve Gorder in 2022. That April, WWD reported that the fashion label Alice + Olivia had teamed up with Tempaper, which it called “a manufacturer of removable wallpaper,” on a peel-and-stick collection marking the label’s twentieth anniversary, with paisley, forget-me-not and “Stace Face” prints tied to its spring 2022 clothing. More recently the company has worked with the designer Jeremiah Brent: its website says the 2025 Tempaper x Jeremiah Brent Nostalgia Collection received a Domino Good Design Award.

Design and documentation.

Wallpaper and wallcovering makers sell surfaces that are hard to judge from a small sample, so most of them present their work through finished rooms. Company sites typically pair each design with a flat pattern image and a room set, and many add project stories from hotels, shops and private houses. Fromental’s pages group bespoke designs by collection, by collaboration and by colour family, while Muraspec’s home page runs a series of short project stories from hotels, bars and homes.

Naming does a lot of the work. Makers organise their output into named collections, and the names often signal a source or a mood rather than a technical detail: Fromental lists collections such as Chinoiserie and Modern Chinois, and Muraspec trade write-ups from 2013 describe ranges named Artemis, Osaka and Verona. Collaborations with designers and other houses are usually given collection names of their own, as with Hirondelles, made by Fromental with Lalique and reported by Tatler in 2019.

Technique is described in plain terms. Makers set out how a design is produced, whether by hand painting, hand embroidery, screen printing or digital printing, and where the work is done. Fromental’s craftsmanship page explains how silk is sized, painted and backed with rice paper in its Chinese studios, and Muraspec states that its wallcoverings are designed and manufactured in the UK; trade magazines often repeat the specification details, such as backing and weight, that contract buyers ask for.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: who founded the business, who owns it now and where its studios and showrooms are. Some firms are still run by their founders, while others have passed through several owners; Muraspec, for example, now describes itself as employee-owned. The guides in this group set those facts out from dated sources, alongside each maker’s own account of its collections.

A family business with a fashion address book.

Tempaper’s website gives prominent space to the recognition it says it has received: it says it was named an NYCxDESIGN Honoree, appeared on the Inc. 5000 list, and was picked by Better Homes & Gardens in 2024 as its top removable wallpaper. It also says its work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Elle Decor and Forbes Home. These are the company’s own statements.

The way the company speaks to customers reflects its product. Its “message from the founders” describes beautiful home decor “accessible to everyone,” and the website stresses that the papers suit both DIY decorators and design professionals, with a trade and wholesale programme and a list of authorised retailers. In 2023 it told New Jersey Monthly that its most-asked question was how long the paper stays up, and answered that its peel-and-stick paper can be a long-term or a short-term design choice.

The 2023 renaming as Tempaper & Co. kept the original name in front, and the company now describes its offer as “a growing range of wallpaper and wall murals,” from its peel-and-stick papers to an expanding choice of authentic grasscloth, aimed, it says, at both DIYers and design professionals. The founders remain at the centre of the story: both Forbes and New Jersey Monthly present the sisters as the faces of the brand, and the company signs its founders’ message collectively.

For a design guide, Tempaper shows how a single practical promise — paper that peels away cleanly — can carry a brand through murals, grasscloth and fashion collaborations without losing its name. Compare Phillip Jeffries, another New Jersey wallcovering company known for grasscloth, and Hygge & West, an American wallpaper brand founded the same year. For this guide we use a deep teal, dusty rose and linen with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Tempaper’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.