Let's celebrate: wallpaper is here to stay! And that's a
godsend for aesthetic and practical reasons. Firstly, the
practical; not every house is blessed with smooth, paint ready walls.
Sometimes you peel away that lurid or dowdy paper and discover an ugly
surface. Then, wallpaper can cover a thousand sins and no one need ever
know what lies beneath. With walls, sometimes beauty really is only skin
deep! If it's really awful, lining paper can be used under wall paper for
extra camouflage. Lining paper can also help if you're papering over
bright paint with pale paper, so that the colour doesn't show through.
Fashion aside, high end wallpaper has always been a thing of
beauty. For absolute, jaw dropping, mind blowing opulence, you can't go
past De Gournay. De Gournay bespoke wallpapers are hand painted onto
silk. Some papers are covered almost entirely with gold or silver
leaf.
Left to right: Badminton on 22k gold guilded silk, Portobello
Left to right: Temple
Newsam, Willow
on sterling sliver
Above and below: Windswept Blossom, Erlham in custom design colours
De Gournay's designs are not subtle but they are the best
example I know of, of what can be achieved with wall paper if you bold.
As with desserts; the full fat option is just better!
For those of us who are not Marie Antoinette here some
wallpaper options that are (more or less) affordable and very
inspirational.
One of my all time favourite wallpaper sources is
Spoonflower. Spoonflower is one of the most amazing online shops (more
about that another day). Here you can choose from a range of wallpaper
and fabric patterns or upload your own designs and they will print them onto
fabric or wallpaper for you.
In my opinion, one of the coolest designers on
Spoonflower is Holli Zollinger. Her colour schemes
are genius. They're different, they're exciting, but you
could easily live with them (or I could
anyway). Her Elephant and Umbrellas and Foxen designs are
whimsical but contemporary at the same time. At last count there were 544
different patterns and colour ways in Holli’s shop; more there than I could
hope to represent. So hop on over to Spoonflower and check them out!
It would be impossible to talk about wallpaper and not mention
legendary Australian designer Florence Broadhurst. Broadhurst opened her
wallpaper business in 1959 and continued producing paper until her death in
1977. As much as 54 years on, her designs still look as
though they could have been created yesterday. If you want to go
bold with wallpaper, Broadhurst is a fail safe way to go. You would be
hard pressed to make these designs look bad.
Horses Stampede is one of my all time Broadhurst
favourites. The design has a beautiful undulating movement to it
that conjures up thoughts of brumbies wild and proud. Guaranteed to add
energy to any room and to make you walk a little taller every time you see it.
If you are a fan of De Gournay's designs, then
Broadhurst's Egrets will strike a chord.
Japanese Floral is the first Broadhurst design I ever saw and I
still love it.
I can’t pretend that Broadhurst papers are cheap, but buy a roll
and use it creatively. Paper a wall, an
alcove, frame a piece or lay it underneath glass on a table top or behind glass
on a kitchen splash back. A little of
something wonderful is so much better than a lot of something passé.
Wallpaper is not quite as popular in New Zealand as it is
overseas (especially in Britain) but Vision Wall Covering's Fantail is my kiwi favorite It has been around for a while now and has all the makings of
a classic; it's bold but liveable and that fantail reference really
resonates.
So there you have it.
An ode to wall papers. Searching
for wall papers on the internet is a scavenger hunt; one brilliant find leads
to another. How anyone ever commits to hanging just one on the wall, I don't know!
