Just Paper & Tea

The building announces itself before you reach the door. On the side wall of the cream-colored rowhouse at 3232 P Street NW, a large mural by DC artist Aniekan Udofia shows a woman raising a steaming cup, surrounded by botanical forms in deep ochre and green. It is visible from half a block east. The red front door and the small display windows do the rest. Inside, the shop is compact and personal: glass cases of loose-leaf teas, shelves of Florentine journals and handmade Venetian masks, stacks of fine imported paper, and, at a worktable near the back, the beginnings of someone’s wedding invitations.

Nick and Carolyn Wasylczuk opened at this address in November 1989, though not as a stationery shop. They came to Georgetown after years of traveling and living aboard a sailboat, and their first venture here was Georgetown Paint and Wallpaper. Nick had trained in faux finishes and built a portfolio that included Andrew Lloyd Webber’s penthouse and Oprah Winfrey’s Indiana estate. When big-box retailers moved into the area and sold paint at cost, the margins collapsed. Allergies to paint fumes sealed the decision. The owner of neighboring Perfect Papers had died, and her niece, knowing Carolyn’s background as a stationery buyer at Woody’s department store, offered them the fixtures and supplier contacts. The transition happened room by room. The name changed. The teas arrived.

The core of what the shop does is custom stationery, with wedding invitations at the center. Carolyn works with clients through letterpress, engraving, embossing, foil-stamping, thermography, and digital printing. The consultation is free and typically runs an hour. The paper selection is one of the largest in Washington. Among the commissions over the decades: invitations for a celebration connected to Pope Benedict XVI and work tied to the Dalai Lama. The Wasylczuks once caught a duplicate card in a run of 250 invitations by weighing the full stack on a postal scale. Beyond invitations, the shop carries baby announcements, business cards, event stationery, Florentine journals, and a rotating selection of imported gifts that Carolyn sources herself.

The teas, which Carolyn has stocked since the early years, reflect her own preferences as much as any market calculation. They arrive loose-leaf and are sold by the ounce alongside the paper goods, which is an unusual combination that somehow feels inevitable once you are standing in the shop. The city of Washington has recognized Just Paper and Tea as a Legacy Business, the designation given to establishments that have materially shaped their neighborhood over time. The shop has been on this block of P Street for more than 35 years.

Washingtonian Magazine named Just Paper and Tea Best Wedding Vendor in 2020. Hours run Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 5pm. Sunday hours, noon to 4pm, are by appointment, so a call ahead to (202) 333-9141 is worth making before showing up on a Sunday. Mondays are closed. The shop sits on the quieter residential stretch of P Street, east of Wisconsin Avenue, where street parking is easier than the M Street corridor. For a first visit focused on invitations, arrive with a sense of your timeline, your color direction, and any paper samples you have collected. The consultation will take it from there.