Deck the Walls: The History and Craft of Historic Wallpaper
From the beginning, people have decorated their walls. The oldest known example is the Lascaux cave paintings in France — 1,500 engravings and 600 drawings, discovered in 1940 by a seventeen-year-old walking his dog, dating back some 17,000 years and often called the beginning of art itself.
Ancient Egyptians worked with six symbolically important colors in their wall art: black, white, blue, red, green, and yellow. Wealthy Romans covered the main rooms of their homes and villas with colored plaster, and mosaics where they could afford them. Centuries later, in cooler climates, fabric came into use — first as a practical way to keep out drafts, and eventually as elaborate tapestries adorning the walls of European palaces and castles. During the Middle Ages, most churches were decorated with brightly colored wall paintings. Since services were held in Latin, which few congregants understood, these paintings and pictorial stained glass windows helped convey the Bible’s stories and messages to those who couldn’t follow the words.
The Rise of Wallpaper
The earliest known wallpaper in England dates to 1509 — a woodcut pomegranate design printed on the back of a proclamation issued by Henry VIII. The 1600s brought flock paper, made from the leftover wool shearings of cloth manufacturing. Wallpaper became so popular that England introduced a tax on it in 1712, covering any paper “painted, printed or stained to serve as hangings.”
When that tax was repealed in 1836, English designers were freed to create far more complex patterns — and the designs that emerged became the defining look of the Victorian era. Printing technology advanced quickly alongside the demand: Charles Harold Potter’s four-color printing machine, invented in 1839, could turn out 400 rolls of wallpaper a day. By 1850, eight-color printing was available, and by 1874, a twenty-color printing machine had arrived. Prices dropped, and wallpaper — once a luxury — became affordable to ordinary households. In 1888, the introduction of ready-to-use wallpaper paste made hanging it far easier, and for the first time, wallpaper designed specifically for nurseries appeared. Front halls, lounges, and dining rooms all came to feature the bright, patterned looks of the era.
By the late 1800s, British designers like William Morris and Owen Jones had elevated wallpaper into a true art form. Morris, in particular, insisted on the purest colors and printing techniques, and his influence carried through the hundreds of mass-produced papers manufactured from the 1880s to the end of the century. The Second World War brought the boom to an end — wallpaper manufacturing declined through the 1940s and ’50s as most people went back to simply painting their walls.
Bradbury & Bradbury: Reviving a Lost Art
The wallpaper used in our restored rooms comes from Bradbury & Bradbury, a company that specializes in reproducing historic 19th- and 20th-century wallpaper patterns. Bruce Bradbury founded the company in 1979, drawing on the late-19th-century hand-printed patterns that defined Late Victorian interiors. His work is widely credited with reviving art wallpaper and making it fashionable again.
Bradbury & Bradbury’s initial inspiration came from the celebrated Victorian designer and craftsman William Morris, whose most popular wallpaper patterns the company began reproducing and reinterpreting. Additional inspiration came from Walter Crane, P.B. Wright, and Christopher Dresser. The company’s research into Victorian design led to the historic reintroduction of wallpaper “roomsets” — elaborate, coordinated combinations of patterns for both walls and ceilings. Their catalog of printed wainscots (dados), friezes, borders, and ceiling decorations offers a distinctive approach to period-accurate interiors.
How It’s Made
The scale and craftsmanship behind each roll is considerable. Bradbury & Bradbury’s printing tables run 90 feet long, each holding six rolls of wallpaper at a time. Metal rails along the sides of the table have adjustable knobs set to match the repeat of the specific pattern being printed — a complex design for an average-sized Victorian room can require more than 1,000 individual impressions.
Many of the patterns are still created by hand in the traditional manner, painted onto acetate or cut as stencils. A separate stencil must be prepared for every color in a pattern, and all of them have to align perfectly. Screens are made by coating silk with a photo-sensitive emulsion — essentially creating a large piece of film. The screen and artwork are sandwiched together in a large vacuum frame and exposed to light; the areas exposed to light become impervious, while the rest can be washed away. Early screens used silk stretched on wooden frames; today, the process uses monofilament polyester on titanium frames.
To apply the pattern, paint is forced through the stencil with a plastic-bladed squeegee, and the printer must skip every other repeat to avoid the silk screen frame falling into wet ink. Each screen lays down a single color — so an eight-color pattern must be printed eight separate times, with eight different screens.
The Designers Behind the Patterns
William Morris and Walter Crane are considered two of the undisputed geniuses of 19th-century pattern design, and co-founders of the English Arts & Crafts movement. Their designs often appeared together — most notably at Queen Victoria’s own Kensington Palace. Morris was a prolific designer of wall and ceiling patterns for printed wallpaper, but many of Morris & Co.’s most impressive interiors — created for the firm’s most prestigious clients, including Queen Victoria herself — were stenciled and hand-painted directly onto the wall, featuring magnificent dados, borders, and friezes that were never translated onto printed paper at all.
Christopher Dresser, meanwhile, was something of a futurist among Victorian designers. Recognizing early that design’s future would be shaped by technology, he embraced machine production and became one of the world’s first named industrial designers.
Two other movements shaped the era’s decorative language. Victorian Orientalism drew on original Indo-Persian designs, with elaborate motifs that — used alone or in combination — could transform a plain room into a striking, jewel-box interior. The Aesthetic Movement, closely tied to the broader High Victorian Gothic style and championed in part by Oscar Wilde, emerged in English and American interiors and decorative arts during the last quarter of the 19th century. Strongly influenced by Japanese design, it held that artfully ornamental interiors were essential to a life well lived.
The Man Who Hung the Paper
All of this history and craftsmanship still has to end up on an actual wall — and for this project, that job belonged to Stacy Sales, an extraordinary wallpaper hanger who we caught up with just before he left for his next job in Chicago.
Stacy was born in Valley Falls, Kansas, and grew up in Topeka. He started learning the trade at age 20; this is his 48th year in the business, and he’s currently 68. “I will quit when the phone quits ringing,” he says — though he’s quick to add that’s only if his health holds out. Nearly five decades of hanging wallpaper has taken a real physical toll. “Everything aches, every muscle in my body aches — it is literally a back-breaking job,” he reflected. “I have good days and bad days. It slowly wears you out over the years, and it’s like anything else — it’s the repetition of movements that causes grief in the long term.”
But for Stacy, the work is about more than the toll it takes. “The Schifferdecker & Zelleken homes I see as a part of history being preserved,” he told us. “This is most satisfying to me. I also know that all of our work will be appreciated for years to come long after we are gone.” Of the Bradbury & Bradbury patterns specifically, he says simply: “I love the hand-painted Bradbury and Bradbury style and the time and art form it represents.”
“I love being a part of this historic restoration project,” he added, “and am honored to be associated with it.”