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Creating Creative Classrooms: Wrapping 7 Unique Learning Spaces at Mission College
A classroom doesn’t have to stop at four blank walls. At Mission College in Santa Clara, California, Andresen transformed seven classrooms, labs, lecture spaces, and student lounges with custom-printed wall murals and architectural wraps.
Each approximately 10-by-15-foot space received a completely different visual identity—from Renaissance architecture and Leonardo da Vinci sketches to retro gaming, literature, computing history, and science fiction. Andresen extended the graphics beyond traditional wallpaper onto floors, stairs, cabinetry, and permanent architectural structures, demonstrating just how versatile large-format environmental graphics can be.
Commercial Wallpaper Built for Campus Life
Custom wallpaper in a college environment has to do more than look good. These spaces experience constant student traffic, moving furniture, repeated touching, and everyday wear.
Andresen uses premium commercial-grade vinyl materials appropriate to each surface, with protective finishing where required. The result is high-quality environmental graphics designed for active commercial and educational environments while maintaining consistent color and visual impact.
And walls are only the beginning. Depending on the application, Andresen can produce custom wraps for floors, stairs, cabinetry, doors, windows, furniture, and other suitable architectural surfaces.
Seven Rooms, Seven Visual Stories
The School of Athens
One of the most immersive installations recreates the architectural background of Raphael’s The School of Athens inside an intimate lecture room.
Rather than ending the mural at the wall, Andresen produced a complementary floor and stair wrap that extends the staircase depicted in the painting into the physical classroom, creating the illusion of stepping directly into the artwork.
Space Invaders
A student lounge takes an entirely different direction with a vivid blue outer-space mural filled with retro Space Invaders-inspired characters.
Combined with throwback gaming posters and arcade machines, the custom wallpaper gives the room a playful 8-bit personality.
A Forest Moon
A laboratory classroom is transformed into a science-fiction forest inspired by Endor from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Towering trees, Imperial walkers, and Star Destroyers create an imaginative technology-themed environment for the lab.
Maya Angelou
Another learning space features a dramatic black-and-white photographic mural of Maya Angelou, with long-format text from her work incorporated across the image.
The installation demonstrates Andresen's ability to reproduce detailed photography and highly legible typography at architectural scale.
Leonardo da Vinci
In another lecture room, enlarged imagery inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's mechanical studies and life drawings covers the walls, transforming delicate sketches into large-format environmental graphics while preserving their fine line detail.
Alan Turing
An internal server room could easily have interrupted the design of another lecture space. Instead, Andresen incorporated the structure into the environment by wrapping its exterior walls with imagery depicting Alan Turing's Bombe.
It's a great example of designing environmental graphics around permanent architecture rather than allowing it to interrupt the artwork.
Japanese-Inspired Landscapes
In the final lab classroom, black-ink Japanese-inspired landscape imagery and script extend beyond the walls and across a large bank of built-in storage cabinetry.
Rather than stopping at the cabinets, Andresen made them part of the composition—another example of taking architectural graphics beyond traditional wallpaper.
Measure Twice, Print Once
Creating seamless murals across seven different rooms required extensive planning before anything went to print.
Andresen methodically surveyed each space, documenting walls, doors, windows, electrical outlets, pipes, conduit, cabinetry, permanent fixtures, and other architectural features.
These measurements determined panel dimensions, cut locations, artwork preparation, and installation sequencing. The goal was to prevent awkward image breaks and allow the murals to flow naturally around the architecture.
Although this was one Mission College initiative, Andresen was effectively managing seven different environmental graphics projects at once, each with unique artwork, dimensions, surfaces, materials, and installation requirements.
From printing through completed installation, the entire project was executed in approximately three weeks.
Large-Format Printing with Consistent Color
All graphics were produced in-house at Andresen using the EFI VUTEk, Vanguard, and Canon Colorado large-format printers.
Producing the work internally gave Andresen close control over color consistency, print quality, materials, scheduling, and panel-to-panel matching.
That was especially important on a project ranging from monochromatic photography and delicate da Vinci sketches to saturated gaming graphics and detailed forest imagery. Regardless of artistic style, adjoining panels needed to come together as one continuous image.
Beyond Wallpaper: Wrapping the Architecture
The Mission College project demonstrates why "custom wallpaper" only begins to describe Andresen's capabilities.
Depending on the surface and application, custom graphics can extend across:
Walls
Floors and staircases
Cabinetry and doors
Windows and columns
Furniture and fixtures
Other suitable architectural surfaces
Different surfaces require different vinyls, adhesives, protective finishes, and installation techniques. Understanding those differences is what turns large-format printing into a complete architectural graphics solution.
Professional Installation from Room to Room
Once printing was complete, the graphics were organized by room and installation sequence, transported to Mission College, and installed by a two- to four-person Andresen crew over four days.
The team methodically moved from room to room, aligning panels, working around permanent fixtures, wrapping specialized surfaces, and maintaining seamless transitions throughout each installation. Andresen can also coordinate after-hours or nighttime installation when necessary to minimize disruption to an active facility.
Because the murals are produced as carefully planned panels, individual sections can also be replaced if damaged without necessarily reprinting an entire room—an important advantage in a high-traffic college environment.
Seven Rooms, One Complete Environmental Graphics Partner
Within a single Mission College project, Andresen transformed seven ordinary spaces into completely different experiences.
What connects them isn't their visual style. It's the process behind them: site surveying, project management, material expertise, large-format printing, color control, and professional installation.
From a single custom wall mural to an entire multi-room facility, Andresen can manage environmental graphics from supplied artwork through surveying, printing, delivery, installation, and future panel replacement.
Because when walls, floors, stairs, cabinetry, and architectural features can all become part of the design, creativity doesn't have to stop at the walls.
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