Wallpaper Past. Wallpaper Now.

Wallpaper. It invites nostalgia. Remember some of the funky wallpaper choices used to dress sets in old TV shows? As a kid, I vaguely recall seeing some cheery wallpaper with a kitchen utensil design, maybe in a friend’s home. Funky. Since we’ve embraced all that is retro, wallpaper’s back in a big way. Not only can you probably find that kitchen utensil wallpaper, but a range extremely refined wallpaper designs that work equally well in a mid-century modern dwelling to the most opulent of abodes. My most cherished wallpaper memory: Aunt Stella’s house, an incredibly stylish woman with a magnetic personality and amazing wardrobe, replete with feather boas and lots of bling. She had jet-black hair, wore black often offset by gold and fun costume jewelry. I am lucky enough to have her fancy black velvet swing coat with three-quarter sleeves that my cousins gave me. Her decorating style really matched her flair for drama. On one end of her living room in her home in suburban Chicago, she had black/gold velvet wallpaper in a fleur-de-lis design that nicely set off the gilded furniture and lamps adorned with tear-drop shaped crystals. Loved it. Such a strong association in my mind, those colors black and gold.

When we were remodeling our condo, which is located in an 18th-century palazzo in the center of our town, it had been abandoned for years. The bank we bought it from–and incidentally is right downstairs–had built apartments to house staff members upstairs from the bank and did not think of maintaining some of the original character of the spaces while in the process. We couldn’t just jump into Welle’s Time Machine and travel back a few centuries to restore the property to what it had once been. The fascinating history of our building–and the people who inhabited it–will be shared in a later post. Aside from finding some cool original architectural details behind the walls when we remodeled, we went modern.

To offset the white walls in the open living space, One of the elements the interior designer Letizia Donati (and great friend) suggested was wallpaper The staircase leading to the second floor seemed the perfect canvas to make a bold gesture. We selected ours from a German company, called simply 1970s Wallpaper, with wavy, onion-shaped lines in orange, textured green-gold, dark brown, and cream. The colors enhance the open staircase treated in black resin-cement by a Florentine artisan. With its bold architectural lines, the soaring stairway ceiling rises nearly 20 feet; my spouse had to use a safety belt when installing the light fixture he designed. As you turn the corner to the upstairs floor, a wall painted sage green picks up the color of the textured green-gold of the wallpaper and continues through to the earth tones of the master bedroom and bath. We used about 1 ½ rolls to cover the wall and it cost about 50 euro for a roll. There are wallpapers that are more expensive especially if there's a designer’s name attached to it (think: Ralph Lauren Home), but it’s still a cost-effective way to make a big, bold statement particularly if you’re covering a massive wall. I love to observe ours from different angles and graze my hand across its texture when I walk upstairs to our second floor. Everyone knows how difficult it is to strip wallpaper so my thinking is we could always paint it white (several coats of it) and it would still look interesting because of the paper's texture. Then again, it could be fun choosing a totally different wallpaper next time around. My recommendation if you live in North America: York Wallcoverings has been manufacturing wallpaper in the same location in York, Pennsylvania since 1895, boasting a dizzying gamma of wall coverings including ones incorporating natural materials such as leaves, grass and cork. Simply stunning.