Plastic Fantastic

The color of money on Canal Street in Nashua, N.H., is tangerine one day and magenta the next. It's there, in a 20,000-square-foot converted luggage factory, that artist Mary Boone Wellington has built a highly profitable business from one of her creations: sturdy sheets of tinted plastic used in retail displays, chi-chi restaurant ceilings, and avant-garde corporate boardrooms.

Wellington makes the translucent material, called LightBlocks, using a patented technique that treats and colors sheets of acrylic or polycarbonate to form a pliable plastic that is nearly impossible to scratch and, when backlit, seems to glow. "When a designer holds a piece in their hand, they often get a dreamy look as though it's catalyzing some inspiration," says Wellington. "It just seems to spark off a lot of new concepts."