Thibaut Brand Guidelines: An 1886 New York Wallpaper House, Now a New Jersey Design Group

A wallpaper seller in Manhattan.

Thibaut dates itself to 1886. On its own history page the company says Richard E. Thibaut, then aged 29, opened its doors on Madison Avenue in New York City that year, promising, in a line it still quotes, “the choicest colorings and designs” in wallpaper. In 1889, it says, Thibaut and his staff opened the firm’s first retail storefront, on Great Jones Street in Manhattan, and by 1911 the company was still delivering rolls of wallpaper by horse and buggy.

Much of that early story rests on the company’s own timeline, and it is told as a set of dated moments rather than a full history. Thibaut says a 1932 feature in House & Garden, titled “The Beauty of Thibaut Wallpaper,” offered readers a small lift during the Great Depression, and that its scenic murals became popular in American homes in the 1960s. It names three of them, Ships Haven, Memory Lane and Magnolia Hill, as among the most recognisable, and dates their peak to 1966.

The company describes itself as “the oldest wallpaper company in the United States”, and its current owner, the investment firm Quad-C, calls it the nation’s oldest continuously operating wallcovering company. Both are the companies’ own descriptions. In 2026 Thibaut marked its 140th anniversary with a campaign it calls “140 Years of Style,” built around archive patterns and an “Into the Archives” series on designs that have returned over the decades.

The business that carries the name today is no longer in Manhattan. Business of Home described Thibaut in November 2021 as a New Jersey–based fabric, wallcoverings and furniture brand, and the company’s contact page gives its base as Union, New Jersey.

From wallpaper to a trade design group.

Thibaut sells mainly to the interior-design trade. Quad-C says its products are sold through interior designers, trade-only showrooms and selected retail stores, and the company presents itself as “a trusted partner and resource for discerning interior designers,” with in-house design studios and, by its own count, no fewer than a dozen new introductions a year.

The range has widened well beyond wallpaper. Thibaut says it added tapes and trims in 2020, and Business of Home reported in 2021 that it had added tape, trim and sheers that year. In 2024, the company says, it launched Thibaut AREAS, cut-to-order area rugs, and Thibaut Contract, wallcoverings and textiles for commercial spaces; its autumn 2026 contract edit includes vinyls in wide and standard widths alongside textured natural designs. It also sells furniture, and in 2026 announced an exclusive partnership with the Belgian furniture maker Vincent Sheppard to reissue two archive lines, Butterfly and Rondo, in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Collections are presented as named books with a story attached. The Fairhaven collection, which the company says draws on the Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gathers nearly 100 wallcoverings and fabrics with watercolour patterns, hand-drawn florals and block-print designs. The Mural Resource collection, it says, carries the long history of murals forward with landscapes, flora and fauna, cityscapes and abstracts.

The group also holds other names. Thibaut says it bought the British wallcovering and fabric brand Anna French in 2007, the Italian textile brand Coraggio in 2022 and the boutique textile brand Rosemary Hallgarten in 2024, and that the same year it became the exclusive North American representative for Armani/Casa wallcoverings. Today it offers wallcoverings, fabrics, trims, area rugs and furniture under the Thibaut, Anna French and Coraggio names.

Wallpaper and wallcovering makers.

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 chain of investors, and a showroom map.

Thibaut has changed hands several times this century. According to Business of Home, in 2005 the company’s management and the investment firm The Riverside Company bought it from the specialty coatings maker RPM International; in 2014 management and Champlain Capital became co-owners; and in 2017 it was bought by the St. Louis firm Harbour Group. In November 2021 the magazine reported that the Minneapolis firm Norwest Equity Partners had bought Thibaut, on terms that were not disclosed, and described the deal as “the latest link in a long chain of private equity ownership.” Rick Kilmer had become chief executive in June 2019, the magazine said, and still holds that post on the company’s leadership page.

The latest change came in 2026. Quad-C, an investment firm based in Charlottesville, Virginia, dates its announcement of an investment in Thibaut to 13 May 2026, and its portfolio page lists Thibaut as a current holding with a 2026 investment date.

The physical side of the business has grown with it. Business of Home reported in 2021 that Thibaut had moved its distribution warehouse and logistics to Charlotte, North Carolina, and the company dates that distribution centre to 2020. Its showrooms follow the design trade: the company says it opened its first flagship showroom in New York’s Decoration and Design Building in 2014, added Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago in 2018 and 2019, Dallas in 2023, and a new Manhattan flagship at the New York Design Center in 2025, designed with the interior designer and architect David Frasier. Its showroom list also includes Nashville, High Point in North Carolina, and a London showroom on Lots Road in Chelsea, which serves the Anna French side of the group.

For a design guide, Thibaut shows how a nineteenth-century wallpaper name can be carried by its archive and its pattern books through decades of new owners. Compare Schumacher, another American fabrics and wallcoverings house, and Phillip Jeffries, another American wallcovering house. For this guide we use a deep green, a blue-grey, sage and brass on a cream ground with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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