YOU COULD SAY that the story of how David Hamlin and Leslie Lippi vaulted from local obscurity into the hot, hot spotlight of the New York design world begins with the surprising call they received at 2:30 in the afternoon on an otherwise normal Thursday last May.

The call changed their lives, along with the fortunes of their fledgling Seattle design firm Fold, which makes cutting-edge wall hangings meant to add texture to the contemporary profusion of large, stark, flat-painted surfaces.

From the unexpected call sprang a wave of interest in Fold's work. But really, to tell the full story, one has to go back before the caller from New York asked that Hamlin and Lippi produce something they hadn't even begun to think of making: a press kit.
 

COURTESY OF ANNIK STAHL
"Waveform," created in 1999 for a sculpture show, was the first of Hamlin's wall hangings to feature ridges of raised felt that curve and slope, attracting the eye with the possibility of an ongoing search for the end of the pattern (there is none).

The story actually begins in the 1980s with a young man who wanted to be a painter. This is David Hamlin. He grew up in Boulder, Colo., and studied painting in college but dropped out and soon quit painting altogether because he had discovered something important: He had nothing to say.

In 1989, Hamlin moved to Seattle on a lark and began a meandering 10-year-long creative path during which he lived cheap and discovered something else: "I decided I was unhappy just trying to live from project to project, and that I wanted to say something."

Meanwhile, a young woman named Leslie Lippi had packed up and left San Francisco for Seattle, also in 1989. She took a job as a salesperson at Spot Bagels and soon found herself working as the owner's right-hand "man." She learned about money and came to a realization: "Wow, I love this!"

What she loved was running a business, making a profit. In 1991, Lippi opened the Pink Zone, a Capitol Hill novelty store. When she wanted to remodel years later, she hired Hamlin. At some point during the rearranging that ensued, she began to think Hamlin would make a good business partner. The feeling was mutual. Later on, he would say: "I've been waiting for someone like her all my life."

They moved in together a year ago, but hold on, this is not a love story. This is a story about a friendship and a shared vision. In the spring they solidified their idea of a design company called Fold and set about getting a booth at New York's annual International Contemporary Furniture Fair.

The fair "is one of the major shows, especially for emerging designers," said Kelli Gierz, who exhibited at it when she worked for interior furnishings giant Herman Miller. "It gives them an opportunity to expose what they're doing to a huge number of consumers, retailers and manufacturers."

The fair is a juried event, so Fold entered its unique wall hangings created from squares of felt and folded into patterns. The jury admitted Fold to the show, giving Hamlin and Lippi the right to pay $3,200 for the privilege.

A week and a half before the event, they got the call. A woman with the fair wanted a press kit to give to The New York Times, which had seen Fold's wares in the convention booklet and hoped to feature the young designers. Oh, and the paper wanted the press kit the next day.
 

	Designers David Hamlin, 37, and Leslie Lippi, 35, are proud of this piece from their new Con Struct line entitled "Finite." They call the color "solar."

It was a chance too big to miss, so they dropped everything and assembled a kit just in time, they thought, to make the last Fed Ex deadline.

But they missed the deadline. "I looked at Leslie," Hamlin remembers, "and said, 'How badly do you want to be in The New York Times?' She said, 'Very, very badly.' "

So Hamlin bought a plane ticket, flew to New York that night, hand-delivered the press kit the next morning and flew back to Seattle the next day.

As it turns out, he says, "it was a gamble that paid off tenfold."

When they got to the show, their little 10-by-10 pad "was swarming with people all day long every day," Hamlin recalls. Architects, interior designers, people representing car dealers, shoe manufacturers, department stores.

"There's nothing that creates buzz like having The New York Times photographer follow you around for three days," Hamlin says. But it wasn't just the photographer. It was the product. Fold makes interesting chairs and tables, and area wall plaques formed from 484 separate pieces of metal-leafed paper. But its buzz-generator was clearly the wall hangings.

The standard-size hanging is a 52-inch square made up of 100 smaller 5-inch squares. The smaller squares are formed from felt that has been folded into clean, repetitive shapes and painted with latex wall color. Soft-toned rings and a long rod of metal hold the whole contraption together.

"It's a fantastic product," says Daniel Vehse, an L.A.-based concept designer who works with Volkswagen. "I really enjoy it, and everyone who's seen it has felt the same way," Vehse said. He likes their "origami effect" and says they're "small enough that you can imagine several applications. And that's nice for everyone, from the interior designer to the car designer."

Why make stuff like this?

"I'm a Virgo," Hamlin says, giggling. And then, more seriously: "I love pattern. I love repetition with a purpose. It's like entertainment for the eyeballs."

And, he says, the wall hanging is high design in hand-crafted form.

The San Francisco interior-design store Sugar has started carrying Fold's wall hangings. So has Portland design store Mono and Seattle furnishings store Urbanese. And since the show, Fold has opened 20 new retail accounts, sold to more than 10 individuals and begun working on projects with four design firms.

The Fold staff is just Hamlin and Lippi, plus one or two assistants, working out of the pair's Capitol Hill house. They worry about getting ripped off now that their idea is out, but vow to rip themselves off first in order to stay ahead in the competitive design game. And now that they've had a taste of the limelight, the goal is simple, says Hamlin:

"Total world domination."