Every pattern tells a story
Historic resources and online archives are helping to rescue wallpaper from the designer dungeon
Walking past a yellowed trompe l'oeil and a maroon damask, Neil Brochu stops before a square of wallpaper that dates back to about the 1880s. Though torn and stained in places, a delicate pattern of blue flowers still rises brightly from a field of muted sea green.
"This is one of my favourites," says Mr. Brochu, a collections specialist with the City of Toronto. "It has such beautifully saturated colours."
This wallpaper was discovered behind a plaster wall during a restoration of the historic Spadina house, where it once graced a dining room. Now it's one of hundreds of samples in the City of Toronto's growing database of historical wallpaper, including some dating back to the Fort York days of the early 1800s.
The city will use the database to decorate its own historic properties, and Mr. Brochu hopes the finished catalogue will eventually go online as a resource for people who want to renovate their old homes with historically accurate patterns and colours.
Neil Brochu, a collections specialist with the City of Toronto, shows some of the historic wallpaper from the Spadina house. (Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail)
Toronto is following in the footsteps of Historic New England, a Boston-based conservation group that put its collection of 4,000 historic wallpaper samples online three years ago, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which has a similar searchable online database.
"I've been very pleased with the number of responses and the whole variety of users," says Historic New England senior curator Richard Nylander, who says the online catalogue attracts historians as well as homeowners looking to identify scraps of old wallpaper or hoping to find reproduction patterns that match the era of their house.
Those looking for wallpaper ideas are in luck: These historic resources are helping to fuel a small renaissance in high-end wallpaper.
Inspired by the bold patterns of the past, wallpaper design is becoming fashionable again after a few decades of languishing in the decor dungeon.
"Faux finishes are dead now, and people are getting back into real wallpaper," says Ruth Bell, owner of Village Paint and Wallpaper in Toronto. "I've noticed the home-decor shows are featuring more wallpaper, and people get inspired by what they see on TV."
Popular design blogs such as Apartment Therapy and Design*Sponge have been featuring a lush crop of new wallpaper designs recently: Traditional prints in bright colours, bold baroque and art nouveau patterns, metallics and even scratch-and-sniff banana and cherry prints testify to wallpaper's renewed trendiness.
Wallpaper really hit its high point in the late 19th century, though, when every square inch of a fine home - even the ceilings - would be covered with decorative prints.
"There are pattern combinations that would send a modern designer screaming," Mr. Nylander says.
Finding and dating these old wallpapers requires a mix of archeological skills, Internet sleuthing and informed guesswork. Mr. Brochu says historical wallpaper is often found behind radiators, modern plumbing and false ceilings. One gorgeous chrysanthemum and peony print was hiding behind a big, stuffed reindeer head in the Spadina house.
There may be five layers of wallpaper stuck atop one another, as the home's owners simply papered over the old with the new. The craze for redecorating on a whim clearly predates Rona or Home Depot. As they peel back the layers, archivists know they're going further back in time.
To figure out the age of a wallpaper, Mr. Brochu usually starts with the date the house was constructed, and then looks for clues such as receipts and bills. Interior photographs are a rare godsend - a Saturday Night magazine feature from 1915 allowed him to place a particularly striking brown and green art nouveau print in the front foyer of the Spadina house. Online databases from other regions in the United States and Canada help him narrow down the dates.
You can't often tell a wallpaper's age by its pattern, as our ancestors loved historical appropriation and influences as much as we do. A 1920s paper may borrow an 1840s pattern, for example, with just a subtle colour update.
"I'll use all the physical evidence and a certain amount of intuition" to determine the dates of tricky wallpapers, Mr. Brochu says.
In fact, many of the crumbling wallpapers in the city's archive would look perfectly at home today in a hipster's living room or granny's kitchen (depending on the pattern). Even the metallic damask wallpapers that are so popular now have historical roots in 19th-century gilded papers, which helped brighten up rooms with small windows.
That's one of the pleasant surprises of historical renovation, says Rollo Myers, manager of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario.
"Victorians had a better sense of colour than most people think," Mr. Myers says. He says the appetite for historically accurate wallpaper is small but growing, especially as more resources such as Toronto's wallpaper database become available.
"That might spur people to try harder," he says.
1 comment:
that was an interesting article, it's kinda cool how wallpaper is making a comeback, I would totally buy that scratch and sniff wallpaper. It's a form of expression that paint just doesn't give and especially with all the old vintage patterned wallpaper, it'll definiately give a retro look to any room. But also fashion and trends always make a comeback, what was old will eventually come back. It's neat to have archives catered towards something so specific like wallpaper.
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