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    Wallpaper
    Wallpaper
    Wallpaper
    Ebook98 pages41 minutes

    Wallpaper

    By Zoë Hendon

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    About this ebook

    We agonise and argue when choosing it; we admire, compliment and criticise it (or keep politely quiet about it); and the rest of the time we don't even notice it. Wallpaper has been the backdrop to our homes for hundreds of years. It can make a house feel cosy or trendy, modern or traditional, and it is one of the key elements of home décor through which to express personal taste. Despite the threat from plain-painted minimalism, wallpaper maintains a strong presence in modern domestic decoration. Zoë Hendon traces the history of wallpaper in Britain and its foremost designers, examining how social mobility and new technologies have influenced design trends. From early Chinoiserie, through William Morris and on to the 'feature wall', this book looks at wallpaper's surprisingly controversial place in shaping our sense of home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateSep 20, 2018
    ISBN9781784423124
    Wallpaper
    Author

    Zoë Hendon

    Zoë Hendon is Head of Collections and Associate Professor (Practice) at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA), Middlesex University, UK. She is the author of Wallpaper (Shire Publications, 2018) and has published articles in journals such as Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education, Journal of Decorative Arts, Architecture and Culture and Museum and Society and Journal of Design History for which she is a member of the editorial board.

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      Book preview

      Wallpaper - Zoë Hendon

      INTRODUCTION

      Over hundreds of years wallpaper has been used to decorate the most intimate and personal of the spaces we inhabit – the home. The history of wallpaper is the story of changes in fashion and taste, industry and technology, and trade and empire. Thinking about wallpaper is a starting point for thinking about changes in the way we use the spaces in the homes in which we live.

      But wallpaper has not always had the attention it deserves. It generally occupies the background rather than the foreground of our lives, but in doing so it can reveal a lot about who we are or who we would like to be. Wallpapers are frequently an expression of personal taste and a way of helping to define personal identity.

      Wallpaper has been produced and sold in great quantities in Britain over the past few hundred years. Despite this it is not always easy to find out much about how people actually used it. It is much less permanent than other kinds of furnishings and it does not have the same status as furniture or silverware that can be more easily inherited or collected. Rooms tend to be papered and then re-papered on a regular basis. It is relatively rare to find old photographs or other records that show how wallpaper was used alongside other furnishings. (Even in the twentieth century people did not routinely photograph their own homes.)

      When fragments of wallpapers survive in museums they tend to be separated from their context and displayed as ‘art’. This book looks at how wallpaper was made and sold and tries to put it back into the context of how it was used in the home. Wallpaper has also been used in commercial and institutional spaces such as hotels and hospitals, but the focus here is on its use within domestic spaces. What do we know about how wallpaper was used in Britain in the past? How was it used to demarcate different kinds of space within the home? This book draws on evidence of wallpaper in museums and stately homes, as well as advertisements and photographs of real domestic interiors.

      The history of wallpaper is intimately connected to histories of trade and empire; the American War of Independence affected trade with North America in the eighteenth century, and rivalries with French manufacturers informed British industrial policies in the nineteenth century. As the British Empire spread around the globe, the export of wallpaper helped Britons living abroad to make a house feel like ‘home’, even on the other side of the world. Here, though, the focus is on wallpaper in homes within Britain.

      Geometric wallpaper patterns such as this were fashionable throughout the 1930s. This paper uses an ‘autumnal tints’ colour scheme of shades of orange, red, brown and green.

      SEVENTEENTH- AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LUXURY

      In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wallpaper was expensive because paper could only be produced in small sheets rather than continuous rolls. Printing techniques were not well developed. One of the oldest known examples of wallpaper is a block-printed paper from a house in Lambeth, London, which dates from the 1690s. The house was in Paradise Row, a street quite close to Lambeth Palace.

      Wealthy people frequently used textiles such as woven silks and tapestries to decorate their walls. But this was expensive, and throughout its history, wallpaper

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