Decorating with Wallpaper - Hardcover

Catherine Calvert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688144756 ISBN 13: 9780688144753

Publisher: Hearst, 2001

Synopsis

Lavishly illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, a manual surveys the textures and colors, patterns and motifs, history, and myriad uses--not exclusive to wall covering--of wallpaper.

About this title

About the Author:

Catherine Calvert is an editor-at-large for Victoria magazine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Walls wrap our world, and from the moment we began to build houses, we have decorated them. Though some of us live happily in a quiet white cube, content to paint and be done with it, for more than three hundred years wallpapers--whether grand and rich in detail or simply strewn with posies-- have embellished the rooms that hold our lives. Fashion may command a bold stripe one year, a pale and sandy textured wall the next. For those who like to pore over the great volumes of samples, roaming from era to era with the flip of a page, choices have never been richer. Take a wallpaper roll and a brush full of glue to a room and personality blooms, a personality beyond the power of paint. Clever use of wallpaper and borders can manipulate the space, as well as the mood, of the rooms in which we live. What was a box is transformed: Awkward corners disappear, ceilings lift, and furniture and curtains come into a closer relationship than was possible when all sat marooned within white walls. Once wallpapers were a rich man's whimsy. George Washington took it upon himself to order all the wall coverings for Mount Vernon, commanding neat papers in plain blue and green with embossed borders of gold papier-m. But when machines clattered into action during the Industrial Revolution, cheaper wallpapers by the mile covered workingmen's parlors as well as the grand salons of the wealthy. What had begun as fashion's plaything, a clever substitute for far more precious materials, by the end of the nineteenth century had become nearly universal, combining charm and utility in a pattern for living that set the pace for entire decorating schemes.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hearst
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0688144756
• ISBN 13: 9780688144753
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144
• Editor: Victoria Magazine