If These Walls Could Talk…

By Kaitlyn Beickel

Mario Romano didn’t know at the start of his career that he would totally reimagine the design and build process for walls. Beginning with a job in film before branching out into real estate and construction, creativity and design have remained his main focus.

“During my home building phase, I was looking at a lot of tile and stone walls for showers, and I thought, this process hasn’t been updated in thousands of years,” Romano says. “I’d really like it if you could just branch out and make the design as large as you want, to come out of your shower and wrap around the wall and continue even into another room.”

“I started researching and practicing and then came across this really good material called Corian, which could be bonded and welded together,” he added.

He then began creating beautiful, 3D textured surfaces that were infinitely customizable. After a year of research and testing, MR Walls officially launched, and Romano now offers his carved, puzzle piece surfaces all over the U.S. and internationally.

“We put together some engineers and created a software that actually creates the design, the robotic instructions and the puzzle for the installation, all in one process,” Romano says. “That way, when you render the 3D model, you see the rendering and then we can actually go into production. It’s quoted and it’s ready to be produced, through a process that really bridges the design world from the build world.”

Romano sought out to bridge the gap between creating a beautiful design on the computer and turning it into a real-life solution. To ease the installation process and create a seamless look, Romano creates non-repeating design panels that connect together effortlessly.

“One of the unique things that we’re offering is the ability to be non-repetitive,” Romano says. “We want to be able to have the designs without any limitations, so if you want it to be 100 feet without any repetition, we do that.”

“That’s one of the benefits of the puzzle pieces, the puzzle pieces bond together and then the separation of where one piece starts and stops starts to disappear and then you get this experience, which is very much what we experience in nature. Nature doesn’t have to deal with joints, nature just goes on, there’s no separation. Whether it’s the Grand Canyon or constellations, these massive objects are what we draw inspiration from, whether we’re creative or not.”

“I did it myself first on my own homes and then I saw the reaction from other people that would come to either see the house, or real estate agents, other developers and builders, and they started asking, ‘hey how do we get this,’” Romano says. “And that’s when I really thought, I have something here.”

With installation designed to be straightforward, any general contractors, solid surface fabricators, carpenters or tile or stone contractors can install MR Walls with ease.

“We try to be that blur between design, creation and the importance of installation, really creating a solution,” Romano says. “Designers, architects, builders, developers and homeowners come to us and then we’re able to provide this 3D wall surface solution, whether it’s for showers, exterior walls, accent walls, water feature walls. It’s been great to see people embrace this.”

Taking his 3D carved designs to the next level, Romano recommends backlighting the walls or creating a water feature to emphasize the gorgeous texture.

“I think the backlight is also very fascinating because we’re able to take these surfaces and then we can push illumination through them,” Romano says. “We just finished a couple of projects in Phoenix recently that are very beautiful, really punchy.”