Old-House Interiors January/February 2012

Editor’s Note
Thinking back on my adventures with wallpaper, I saw my whole life flash before my eyes. Not surprising, because many of those rooms from the past were rather like a car wreck. I am four years old, aware of the curled-back seams of nubbly Sanitas vinylized paper with teal starbursts, hung over a liver-colored dado. On a move to the suburbs the summer I turned 10, we confronted the previous owner’s obviously bad taste as we scraped the kitchen’s cartoonish walls—teapots and spice jars rendered, with no regard to scale, in machine-printed grisaille.

Now that I think about it, chuckling to myself, my own family’s redecoration was no better. We, too, made do with hardware-store taste. My mother, who had come from a cold-water flat and then a remodeled two-family built in the waning years of the Victorian era, was so happy finally to have her own Colonial (i.e., a ranch with shutters), she bought American Eagle wallpaper for her bedroom. The same strong-jawed eagle (a banner in its talons read E Pluribus Unum) repeated like giant winged polka dots on walls and slanted eaves and dormer cheeks, reflected to infinity in the dresser mirror. Years later as I stripped someone’s odd choice from my own walls, the new owner of my childhood home was undoubtedly cursing the eagles. This, my friends, is how wallpaper got a bad name.

Exposed through my work to historical and art wallpapers, I got over my disdain. Both the boys’ rooms have papered friezes—in a camp style they never found girly. Perhaps my favorite room in our house is a diminutive bath that has a papered dado and a full-on papered ceiling with fill and border. Wallpaper can be the art in the room, or a subtle backdrop. It can be the thing that clinches an era or a style, or hung with a modern twist. You’ll find many different uses of wallpaper in this issue, and lots more.

Patricia Poore, Editor of Old-House Interiors

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