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cimoreneI was asked to talk some more about wallpaper, and I love to talk about wallpaper!
I grew up prejudiced against wallpaper, because my mom, who knows the basics of home improvement, carpentry, plumbing, painting, fixing cars, and nearly everything else, grew up being used as forced labor when her dad would buy an old falling-down house and have the children helping to fix it up before attempting to sell it for more money. So horror stories about trying to remove old wallpaper (and how much easier it was to deal with paint) figured large among her dramatic narratives which imprinted themselves on my impressionable young mind. Also since she was fully capable of single-handedly doing almost everything to fix up the house herself and hated wallpaper, I was learning housepainting at her knee along with all kinds of handicrafts and fine arts (my mom's college degree was in illustration and she later became a middle school art teacher), until as a teenager I was competent to paint rooms in my parents' house, including the ceiling, single-handed while staying in their house alone because my mom and sister were with my dad at the hospital as he recovered from his car accident. (I was in crazytown at the time, but I think the guest room I painted then was a stroke of genius. Making the ceiling kiwi green like the walls above the dark stained chair rail made it feel like a tropical oasis.)
Right, so. I knew ABOUT wallpaper designs, and I was interested in the history of the decorative arts already; I grew up leafing through mom's books of art nouveau and art deco and renaissance decorative motifs; and I first became a fan of William Morris's Arts & Crafts (Victorian, contemporary with Art Nouveau) wallpaper and fabric prints as a teenager. But my knowledge of wallpaper as a substance was limited to using sample sheets of it in decoupage, and horror stories about how difficult it was to remove layers of it from old houses in the midwest in my mom's childhood in the 1960s.
But when we bought our 1950 wooden house in 2019 and dove into researching it we learned that wallpaper was the most common, expected wall treatment for it. I wasn't even willing to consider moving in without changing the wall surface treatments of every single room in the house, on initial walkthrough. (waxjism agreed that things were mostly ugly, but she would totally have been willing to live with some of it for a while, and some of it forever, and my mother-in-law didn't see anything wrong with some of the wallpapers, but was just ¯_(ツ)_/¯ about my aesthetic preferences.) When we bought the house, the existing wallpapers and wall treatments were as follows: the entry hall and the curved feature wall that's the first thing you see when you walk in were both papered in a nasty beige vinyl paper with sort of fake woven grass texture, so with brown and tan bits. This paper was inherently ugly (and vinyl was unacceptable because it puts the house at risk of rot anyway, but we didn't know that yet), but even worse, it was on all the sort of 'background' walls in the entry hall AND on the curved feature wall.
The former owner, bless her heart, had terrible taste and no aesthetic sense. The kitchen was something with off white with little flowers I think. The dining room was a subtle bamboo print, which was cool, but the paper was a yellowy beige that made the room feel brown and dingy. The living room was a boring beige paper with barf pink undertones. The bathrooms were just painted off white, I think, but they were horrible in other ways. The upstairs was mostly just painted wallboard, but the bedroom had been papered in a light pink floral.
The downstairs walls of our house are actually made out of stretched cardboard, a common and inexpensive wall material at that time that was sold on giant rolls, soaked to soften it, then stretched out evenly in all directions and nailed to the framing timbers on all four sides. This construction method was designed to be wallpapered over. We learned that we could also paint the walls as long as the paint wasn't a vapor barrier (no plastic content: traditional oil paints or distemper, tempera, or mineral paints), and we were very attached to my idee fixe that paint is cheaper and better than wallpaper; so we actually did this. We regret it! Wallpaper was the style- and period-appropriate choice and the better choice for our wall type, more forgiving of errors. The distemper-painted walls in our dining room look fine, but distemper is vulnerable to physical wear. The 0-VOC linseed-based eco paint we used in the living room took me like two weeks and like six coats because we chose a medium green and it wasn't opaque in any less. This paint also takes a long time to cure to full hardness, and as a result has various dings in it. We could've papered this room in a similar shade of solid green paper for about a third the cost and a tenth the effort, but again... we were not wise yet.
A primary consideration for us was choosing period-appropriate wallpaper and curtains that would fit the architecture and feel of the house.
Kitchen.
waxjism and I have both posted before about how we later spotted our kitchen wallpaper, by the Swedish Boråstapeter, in The Queen's Gambit (I know now that they filmed it in Europe in order to work with my idol, German production designer Uli Hanisch, so it makes a lot more sense to find the paper there...). (Illustrative screencap in an old post of Wax's here; product page here.) We fell in love with this paper when we saw a sample in a rack by the door at a wallpaper shop in Turku, actually, but we had already bought the backsplash tiles you can see here behind Sipuli from a local guy on Finland's equivalent of Craigslist (tori.fi).
When we saw that the wallpaper matched our tiles we got very excited and bought it immediately, and I chose the cabinet colors (the cabinets are from Ikea; we bought painted wooden doors so that I could paint over them) to match later. (We always intended to put it only on the one wall, knowing that the other ones would be mostly covered with cabinets and backsplash. This wallpaper is too expensive to waste. People did use wallpaper as backsplash in the mid 20th century for a while, at least in the US - not so much in Finland - but tile is a far superior backsplash material in many ways.) In the absence of this particular tile, we probably would have chosen a wallpaper first and picked the cabinet color and tile color afterwards. I'm very fond of Pihlgren & Ritola's Orange tree (it really looks like lemons but it's also available with red and blue fruits!) paper, but maybe we'd've gone with a more sixties one like Sunflower or Roosters. I was really drawn to Boråstapeter's Herbarium by Stig Lindberg, a colorful midcentury floral.
Curved entryway wall.
There's a picture of this up above in its current wallpaper, Sanderson Hampton Trellis. (A couple more are available in this old post about my beloved rainbow ball coatrack.) I fell for this kelly-green paper with its large-scale white geometric trellis print early in house research and so didwaxjism. We knew immediately that we needed a bold contrast treatment for this curved feature wall, but we didn't decide on this paper immediately because it's by far the most expensive wallpaper we bought for the house. I spent like a year looking for an alternative that we liked even slightly as much that cost less, and we could never find one that we could be happy with. You had to visualize the size of the curved wall and its place in the room, and it needed to be a bold pattern of a certain scale with a strong contrast in it, and it turned out that most of the alternatives I could find weren't available in bold enough colors or in the right scale. It isn't 1950s, but there was a trend of chinoiserie (of which this sort of trellis wallpaper is an outgrowth) and also a trend of trellis wallpapers specifically during the 1960s (and the bathroom itself, and hence the curved wall, were added to the house around 1960 - our house and all its DIY clones from the same plans are designed to be built in stages, initially without plumbing, with bathrooms and kitchen sinks etc added later when the family could afford it). This doesn't really look quite like the 60s ones I've seen, but the connection is enough to satisfy me. The kelly green harmonizes nicely with the muted blue-green shades that dominate in the kitchen. I liked a few Pihlgren & Ritola alternatives that all weren't quite right for some reason, like Snowflake (black and white is bold but we prefer colorful!) and Pinecone (same, but mainly the scale was just too small... I really love this print and I love foresty wallpapers), Pro Finlandia (the scale is bold but the color contrast isn't! 1970s art nouveau revival vibes, a little late for us but still in the window of possibility), Paradise (60s-70s folklore/primitivism, nice bold colors and large scale, but as you see in the wall shots, the lozenges tile together into a rather even print even in the really bright colors? And we weren't SUPER into any of the color combinations.)
Living room.
As mentioned above, I painted this room a medium green with an oil-based ecological paint, chosen over distemper because the final surface can be washed with soap and water or scrubbed. We love a medium green! We love this shade!
But if we were so attached to solid green we should've just bought a solid green wallpaper. In the process of stripping a million layers of old wallpaper in this room we learned that the original wallpaper was in fact a medium green - lighter and more muted than our current paper, with a squiggly texture and an abstract organic squiggly print. I also mentioned before that there are dings and scratches in our present wallpaper. The bunnies have torn off and eaten a big piece of it next to the cement chimney wall behind the woodstove and it's been scratched behind the bunny cage, among other problems. For these reasons we will not be repapering this room until after both of our bunnies have died, so it will probably be a few years, but I have looked repeatedly: Pihlgren & Ritola is the five-star, nicest option (paper wallpapers, many period reproductions), and they are small enough that we can't be sure any given colorway will still be for sale then. I am most strongly attracted to the little abstract prints of white on olive, and several of these would look great with our curtains (pictured in this post): Divergence, Annikki. There's also a larger scale print of keys on this same color. The problem is just that the color drinks up all the light and this room already gets very little with its tiny North and West windows, so we discussed trying for a lighter shade than our current medium green. There's a very nice new aqua blue Bownet which would probably work, but that aqua is so close to the kitchen cabinet color (and the wall color upstairs in the library, which can't be wallpapered frtdneatj) that it might be a mistake in terms of the whole house palette. We have previously looked at samples of blue on white and blue/green on white Bownet, but they didn't seem right in the livingroom. Then there's this new tartan wallpaper called Geometria which might work, but again, the blue is closer than I'd like to our kitchen blue and the green is perhaps too dark. There's always plain stripes and there is a muted green, a little bluer than this olive, in a solid wallpaper that we have a sample of as well.
Dining room.
The dining room is currently distempered with a beautiful light bluey aqua, really on the edge of off white, but it's got holes ripped in it by Anubis and spots worn out from my shoulders when sitting up in bed. We can't paint and wallpaper that room (it has a huge built-in cabinet and three small closet doors that need to be repainted in our trim color as well) until Cat Divorce is over, but we have looked and looked at wallpapers. The current curtains, which we are in love with, are a retro-style modern design from Swedish Arvidssons Textil, Leaves by Louise Videlyck, in the same color palette as the adjoining livingroom. We considered the blue-and-green-on-white Bownet and it wasn't terrible, but we are leaning towards Boråstapeter 8622, an overlapping scale pattern in pale green on white, or 8614, a pattern of gray-green diamonds on white. I like the similarity of P&R's Iceflower to the bamboo that was there, but none of the colorways they have made it in recently have been appropriate. If cost was no object, I would maybe do it in Bamboo hand-printed reproduction wallpaper by Swedish Lim & Handtryck.
Powder room.
The downstairs bathroom, or half-bath, or powder room, or WC, the one that was put in about 1960 and fully renovated before we moved in, contains the washing machine as well as sink and toilet, and because it doesn't have a shower, we didn't have to tile all the way up the walls. The wall covering should still be basically water-resistant in case of splashing of course, and there's all that construction waterproofing under the finish so the normal considerations about non-plastic wallcoverings in an old wood house no longer apply. We started with the floor tiles, which are a dark cobalt blue with a lot of color variation, again, leftovers from some local guy on Finnish Craigslist, and we got enough of them to do both our bathrooms. The upstairs is a little shower room, so the walls are tiled all the way up to the ceiling, and we chose white, so I thought the downstairs should have dark walls that blend into the floor to differentiate it. What I really wanted was this underwater wallpaper with swimming koi carp, Derwent by Osborne & Little, or Cole & Son's Acquario which has puffer fish, but I didn't consider them because of price. I was also into similar designs of blue sky dotted with birds like Daydream by Julia Rothman for Hygge & West. In the end we painted with a color matched from the tiles and then I did this undersea mural with white Posca markers and a spray-on acrylic waterproofing coat (there's a picture of it here - maybe I've never posted 360 photos of it).
Landing.
The landing is mostly painted a light sea green, but there is an alcove with this single roll of Pihlgren & Ritola Atom in a discontinued groovy lime green (here). The wall opposite the alcove is still the off-white of the stairwell panels, which we will repaint eventually I guess, but they will still be white. This wallpaper is also inside on the back wall of the wardrobe Wax built. The rest of the library is made of wood fiber panels with a finger gap, which makes it unsuitable for wallpaper. It is painted a very bright light aqua with mineral paint. We love this color, which is an outlier in terms of our palette, but the room always feels very light and bright.
Bedroom.
The bedroom was wallpapered before, and we stripped it, put up a layer of paintable brown paper and painted that with a sort of light khaki green clay paint. Love it! But in retrospect I think I would paper the room in a floral paper in a similar shade of green like Duro Vilhelmina or Boråstapeter Borosan 21 8618. Or if price were no object, Lim & Handtryck's Tjolöholm Slott.
I grew up prejudiced against wallpaper, because my mom, who knows the basics of home improvement, carpentry, plumbing, painting, fixing cars, and nearly everything else, grew up being used as forced labor when her dad would buy an old falling-down house and have the children helping to fix it up before attempting to sell it for more money. So horror stories about trying to remove old wallpaper (and how much easier it was to deal with paint) figured large among her dramatic narratives which imprinted themselves on my impressionable young mind. Also since she was fully capable of single-handedly doing almost everything to fix up the house herself and hated wallpaper, I was learning housepainting at her knee along with all kinds of handicrafts and fine arts (my mom's college degree was in illustration and she later became a middle school art teacher), until as a teenager I was competent to paint rooms in my parents' house, including the ceiling, single-handed while staying in their house alone because my mom and sister were with my dad at the hospital as he recovered from his car accident. (I was in crazytown at the time, but I think the guest room I painted then was a stroke of genius. Making the ceiling kiwi green like the walls above the dark stained chair rail made it feel like a tropical oasis.)
Right, so. I knew ABOUT wallpaper designs, and I was interested in the history of the decorative arts already; I grew up leafing through mom's books of art nouveau and art deco and renaissance decorative motifs; and I first became a fan of William Morris's Arts & Crafts (Victorian, contemporary with Art Nouveau) wallpaper and fabric prints as a teenager. But my knowledge of wallpaper as a substance was limited to using sample sheets of it in decoupage, and horror stories about how difficult it was to remove layers of it from old houses in the midwest in my mom's childhood in the 1960s.
But when we bought our 1950 wooden house in 2019 and dove into researching it we learned that wallpaper was the most common, expected wall treatment for it. I wasn't even willing to consider moving in without changing the wall surface treatments of every single room in the house, on initial walkthrough. (
waxjism agreed that things were mostly ugly, but she would totally have been willing to live with some of it for a while, and some of it forever, and my mother-in-law didn't see anything wrong with some of the wallpapers, but was just ¯_(ツ)_/¯ about my aesthetic preferences.) When we bought the house, the existing wallpapers and wall treatments were as follows: the entry hall and the curved feature wall that's the first thing you see when you walk in were both papered in a nasty beige vinyl paper with sort of fake woven grass texture, so with brown and tan bits. This paper was inherently ugly (and vinyl was unacceptable because it puts the house at risk of rot anyway, but we didn't know that yet), but even worse, it was on all the sort of 'background' walls in the entry hall AND on the curved feature wall. 
The former owner, bless her heart, had terrible taste and no aesthetic sense. The kitchen was something with off white with little flowers I think. The dining room was a subtle bamboo print, which was cool, but the paper was a yellowy beige that made the room feel brown and dingy. The living room was a boring beige paper with barf pink undertones. The bathrooms were just painted off white, I think, but they were horrible in other ways. The upstairs was mostly just painted wallboard, but the bedroom had been papered in a light pink floral.
The downstairs walls of our house are actually made out of stretched cardboard, a common and inexpensive wall material at that time that was sold on giant rolls, soaked to soften it, then stretched out evenly in all directions and nailed to the framing timbers on all four sides. This construction method was designed to be wallpapered over. We learned that we could also paint the walls as long as the paint wasn't a vapor barrier (no plastic content: traditional oil paints or distemper, tempera, or mineral paints), and we were very attached to my idee fixe that paint is cheaper and better than wallpaper; so we actually did this. We regret it! Wallpaper was the style- and period-appropriate choice and the better choice for our wall type, more forgiving of errors. The distemper-painted walls in our dining room look fine, but distemper is vulnerable to physical wear. The 0-VOC linseed-based eco paint we used in the living room took me like two weeks and like six coats because we chose a medium green and it wasn't opaque in any less. This paint also takes a long time to cure to full hardness, and as a result has various dings in it. We could've papered this room in a similar shade of solid green paper for about a third the cost and a tenth the effort, but again... we were not wise yet.
A primary consideration for us was choosing period-appropriate wallpaper and curtains that would fit the architecture and feel of the house.
Kitchen.
waxjism and I have both posted before about how we later spotted our kitchen wallpaper, by the Swedish Boråstapeter, in The Queen's Gambit (I know now that they filmed it in Europe in order to work with my idol, German production designer Uli Hanisch, so it makes a lot more sense to find the paper there...). (Illustrative screencap in an old post of Wax's here; product page here.) We fell in love with this paper when we saw a sample in a rack by the door at a wallpaper shop in Turku, actually, but we had already bought the backsplash tiles you can see here behind Sipuli from a local guy on Finland's equivalent of Craigslist (tori.fi).
When we saw that the wallpaper matched our tiles we got very excited and bought it immediately, and I chose the cabinet colors (the cabinets are from Ikea; we bought painted wooden doors so that I could paint over them) to match later. (We always intended to put it only on the one wall, knowing that the other ones would be mostly covered with cabinets and backsplash. This wallpaper is too expensive to waste. People did use wallpaper as backsplash in the mid 20th century for a while, at least in the US - not so much in Finland - but tile is a far superior backsplash material in many ways.) In the absence of this particular tile, we probably would have chosen a wallpaper first and picked the cabinet color and tile color afterwards. I'm very fond of Pihlgren & Ritola's Orange tree (it really looks like lemons but it's also available with red and blue fruits!) paper, but maybe we'd've gone with a more sixties one like Sunflower or Roosters. I was really drawn to Boråstapeter's Herbarium by Stig Lindberg, a colorful midcentury floral.
Curved entryway wall.
There's a picture of this up above in its current wallpaper, Sanderson Hampton Trellis. (A couple more are available in this old post about my beloved rainbow ball coatrack.) I fell for this kelly-green paper with its large-scale white geometric trellis print early in house research and so did
waxjism. We knew immediately that we needed a bold contrast treatment for this curved feature wall, but we didn't decide on this paper immediately because it's by far the most expensive wallpaper we bought for the house. I spent like a year looking for an alternative that we liked even slightly as much that cost less, and we could never find one that we could be happy with. You had to visualize the size of the curved wall and its place in the room, and it needed to be a bold pattern of a certain scale with a strong contrast in it, and it turned out that most of the alternatives I could find weren't available in bold enough colors or in the right scale. It isn't 1950s, but there was a trend of chinoiserie (of which this sort of trellis wallpaper is an outgrowth) and also a trend of trellis wallpapers specifically during the 1960s (and the bathroom itself, and hence the curved wall, were added to the house around 1960 - our house and all its DIY clones from the same plans are designed to be built in stages, initially without plumbing, with bathrooms and kitchen sinks etc added later when the family could afford it). This doesn't really look quite like the 60s ones I've seen, but the connection is enough to satisfy me. The kelly green harmonizes nicely with the muted blue-green shades that dominate in the kitchen. I liked a few Pihlgren & Ritola alternatives that all weren't quite right for some reason, like Snowflake (black and white is bold but we prefer colorful!) and Pinecone (same, but mainly the scale was just too small... I really love this print and I love foresty wallpapers), Pro Finlandia (the scale is bold but the color contrast isn't! 1970s art nouveau revival vibes, a little late for us but still in the window of possibility), Paradise (60s-70s folklore/primitivism, nice bold colors and large scale, but as you see in the wall shots, the lozenges tile together into a rather even print even in the really bright colors? And we weren't SUPER into any of the color combinations.)Living room.
As mentioned above, I painted this room a medium green with an oil-based ecological paint, chosen over distemper because the final surface can be washed with soap and water or scrubbed. We love a medium green! We love this shade!
But if we were so attached to solid green we should've just bought a solid green wallpaper. In the process of stripping a million layers of old wallpaper in this room we learned that the original wallpaper was in fact a medium green - lighter and more muted than our current paper, with a squiggly texture and an abstract organic squiggly print. I also mentioned before that there are dings and scratches in our present wallpaper. The bunnies have torn off and eaten a big piece of it next to the cement chimney wall behind the woodstove and it's been scratched behind the bunny cage, among other problems. For these reasons we will not be repapering this room until after both of our bunnies have died, so it will probably be a few years, but I have looked repeatedly: Pihlgren & Ritola is the five-star, nicest option (paper wallpapers, many period reproductions), and they are small enough that we can't be sure any given colorway will still be for sale then. I am most strongly attracted to the little abstract prints of white on olive, and several of these would look great with our curtains (pictured in this post): Divergence, Annikki. There's also a larger scale print of keys on this same color. The problem is just that the color drinks up all the light and this room already gets very little with its tiny North and West windows, so we discussed trying for a lighter shade than our current medium green. There's a very nice new aqua blue Bownet which would probably work, but that aqua is so close to the kitchen cabinet color (and the wall color upstairs in the library, which can't be wallpapered frtdneatj) that it might be a mistake in terms of the whole house palette. We have previously looked at samples of blue on white and blue/green on white Bownet, but they didn't seem right in the livingroom. Then there's this new tartan wallpaper called Geometria which might work, but again, the blue is closer than I'd like to our kitchen blue and the green is perhaps too dark. There's always plain stripes and there is a muted green, a little bluer than this olive, in a solid wallpaper that we have a sample of as well.
Dining room.
The dining room is currently distempered with a beautiful light bluey aqua, really on the edge of off white, but it's got holes ripped in it by Anubis and spots worn out from my shoulders when sitting up in bed. We can't paint and wallpaper that room (it has a huge built-in cabinet and three small closet doors that need to be repainted in our trim color as well) until Cat Divorce is over, but we have looked and looked at wallpapers. The current curtains, which we are in love with, are a retro-style modern design from Swedish Arvidssons Textil, Leaves by Louise Videlyck, in the same color palette as the adjoining livingroom. We considered the blue-and-green-on-white Bownet and it wasn't terrible, but we are leaning towards Boråstapeter 8622, an overlapping scale pattern in pale green on white, or 8614, a pattern of gray-green diamonds on white. I like the similarity of P&R's Iceflower to the bamboo that was there, but none of the colorways they have made it in recently have been appropriate. If cost was no object, I would maybe do it in Bamboo hand-printed reproduction wallpaper by Swedish Lim & Handtryck.
Powder room.
The downstairs bathroom, or half-bath, or powder room, or WC, the one that was put in about 1960 and fully renovated before we moved in, contains the washing machine as well as sink and toilet, and because it doesn't have a shower, we didn't have to tile all the way up the walls. The wall covering should still be basically water-resistant in case of splashing of course, and there's all that construction waterproofing under the finish so the normal considerations about non-plastic wallcoverings in an old wood house no longer apply. We started with the floor tiles, which are a dark cobalt blue with a lot of color variation, again, leftovers from some local guy on Finnish Craigslist, and we got enough of them to do both our bathrooms. The upstairs is a little shower room, so the walls are tiled all the way up to the ceiling, and we chose white, so I thought the downstairs should have dark walls that blend into the floor to differentiate it. What I really wanted was this underwater wallpaper with swimming koi carp, Derwent by Osborne & Little, or Cole & Son's Acquario which has puffer fish, but I didn't consider them because of price. I was also into similar designs of blue sky dotted with birds like Daydream by Julia Rothman for Hygge & West. In the end we painted with a color matched from the tiles and then I did this undersea mural with white Posca markers and a spray-on acrylic waterproofing coat (there's a picture of it here - maybe I've never posted 360 photos of it).
Landing.
The landing is mostly painted a light sea green, but there is an alcove with this single roll of Pihlgren & Ritola Atom in a discontinued groovy lime green (here). The wall opposite the alcove is still the off-white of the stairwell panels, which we will repaint eventually I guess, but they will still be white. This wallpaper is also inside on the back wall of the wardrobe Wax built. The rest of the library is made of wood fiber panels with a finger gap, which makes it unsuitable for wallpaper. It is painted a very bright light aqua with mineral paint. We love this color, which is an outlier in terms of our palette, but the room always feels very light and bright.
Bedroom.
The bedroom was wallpapered before, and we stripped it, put up a layer of paintable brown paper and painted that with a sort of light khaki green clay paint. Love it! But in retrospect I think I would paper the room in a floral paper in a similar shade of green like Duro Vilhelmina or Boråstapeter Borosan 21 8618. Or if price were no object, Lim & Handtryck's Tjolöholm Slott.
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