Home design duo debuts wallpaper and vanity designs

Robin Flaherty and Jess Milburn are the design pair behind the local firm North & Madison. When they founded that company in 2017, Flaherty and Milburn were both raising their families in Oak Park and River Forest and after working on their own homes, decided to share their talents through designing homes for others.

The duo cut their teeth on the area’s historic housing stock, adding color and texture to make the vintage structures live well for a new generation.  Before too long, they were working on condos, homes and the occasional commercial project, and their work took them throughout the Chicago area and to other states.

This spring, they took their design work in another direction and launched a new line of semi-custom bathroom vanities. They created four designer styles that come in multiple size options, a vibrant palette of colors and two choices for stone counter tops.

“We started this because we saw the demand,” Flaherty says. “There really is no solution to bathroom vanities. There’s a huge gap between high-cost, custom-designed vanities and a big box store vanity made of MDF (fibreboard).”

She goes on to say that one of the first things clients want them to remodel in their older homes are the bathrooms. Milburn chimes in, “Everyone has bathrooms!”

Their color palette includes bolder hues that the two favor in their designs, which they thought was missing from the marketplace. More neutral colors are also available for those who might be a bit color-averse.

The entire process has been percolating for quite some time. Flaherty notes that they began thinking about creating a line of vanities almost seven years ago. Then in the past three years, they began actively meeting with manufacturers from around the world. They found a partner close to home in a Bensenville-based cabinet maker.

Milburn says, “It ended up making sense to work with our cabinet company that we’d worked with for years on kitchen cabinets. They are great quality.”

Flaherty and Milburn sketched their concepts, turned them into CAD (computer aided design) drawings and then had those drawings translated into shop drawings. They hammered out the details, and then had their manufacturer create samples.

North & Madison currently has several sample cabinets available to peruse on their website www.northandmadisonhome.com, and Flaherty and Milburn note that they’ve already been using the vanities with clients.

“We try to put a special vanity in each project,” says Milburn.

There’s more to their new creative venture than vanities. North & Madison collaborated with artist and print designer Melissa Johnson to create a line of wallpapers in colors that perfectly match the vanity colors.

Milburn says, “The idea was to have the whole design experience available — sort of a choose your own adventure.” 

Flaherty says having vanities that coordinate with wallpapers allows consumers to create “amazing Pinterest bathrooms” all on their own.

Several years ago, when North & Madison was busy with full-service design clients, they launched a Design Concepts service, in which they helped clients choose their designs, and clients executed those designs on their own. Milburn says the vanity and wallpaper pairing breaks this process down even further, letting clients use tried and true combinations to elevate their homes.

The process is relatively quick for a custom design solution. Lead time is four to six weeks, with rush orders available, for vanities. Wallpapers can be ready in about two weeks. There is free vanity delivery in the Oak Park and River Forest area, and customers can order everything, including cabinet color samples, online.

Client feedback has been great according to Milburn and Flaherty. “It’s the manufacturer we’ve been using for years and that we use in our personal house and in clients’ houses. It’s tried and true, and great quality,” says Flaherty.