Wallpaper was first invented in China, where people would engrave different designs on wooden panels, and it reached Europe as early as the 15th century. For centuries, wallpaper has been a common element in every household, even those that were not necessarily wealthy. The fact that it was considered indispensable is something to reflect on, especially at a time when, despite a successful comeback that started more than a decade ago, we continue to see it as an unnecessary decorative device with a maximalist inclination, perhaps to be limited to a single portion of the wall.
The essentials: 20 of the best wallpapers
Even though wallpaper isn't always in fashion, this type of interior decoration is deeply rooted in the tradition of craftsmanship and industrial design. This maximalist way of decorating the home is constantly being renewed through endless experiments with codes and styles.
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- Giulia Zappa
- 10 March 2021
And yet, still today, the desire to mark the walls of our homes with drawings that have a symbolic effect is an essential need, as they are capable of emphasizing that sort of cocoon that every room inevitably ends up being, even though they usually refer to other places and imaginaries far from our daily lives. The almost exclusive presence of floral and natural elements on wallpaper up to the second half of the 20th century seems to confirm this paradox: as our houses become more and more urban, those images recalling the beauty and freedom of nature are evocative and consolatory, and therefore necessary.
Today, when even the industrial reproduction of wallpaper rolls seems to be overtaken by personalized digital printing services, the orthodoxy of natural motifs inevitably appears as a distant past, while the future opens up to personalized motifs capable of playing with hyperrealism or absolute abstraction. In the meantime, it is surprising to discover how prolific the last ten years have been in terms of inventive design – just think of 3D effects, sound interactions, and over-the-top archival rediscoveries. Perhaps this is a way of saying that, despite personal taste, the cues offered to designers by this medium are too valuable, and it is not yet time to replace them with banal on-demand services.
The German artist's masterpiece, consisting of 195 separate wood blocks each measuring 3.57 by 2.95 meters, depicts an allegorical monument to the life of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and his family. Some examples of the first edition of 700 sets are now preserved in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.
The "Panoramiques" series, produced by France's oldest wallpaper manufacturer using the wood plank technique, was originally designed in 1797 and is still being produced today using the same original planks. Views of North America, a majestic and optimistic American panorama stretching across an entire wall, was made popular again in the 1960s when Jackie Kennedy chose it as her new decoration when she moved into the White House.
Despite a not always unanimous consensus, William Morris is perhaps the designer who has most magnified the decorative typology of wallpaper, not only through a prolific and fortunate production that is still widely distributed today but above all with a design capable of restoring in a romantic key the richness and spontaneity of the natural world without retracing it in a hyper-realistic manner. His best-known motifs include Willow Bough, Acanthus, James', Larkspur, and Saladin.
Considered to be the first industrial designer, Christopher Dresser developed an extensive production of wallpapers that was far different from Morris's vision. Dry, flat, strongly marked by symmetries, Dresser's design highlights the essence of natural motifs, always centered on the rigorous supremacy of linear forms.
If Mackintosh is considered the definitive overcoming of English naturalism and historicism, his famous rose pattern – designed in collaboration with his wife Margaret Macdonald together with Herbert and Frances MacNair – betrays an explicit figurativism, even if stylized through staggered circular elements. A reference to medieval as well as Masonic symbolism, the rose in its many variations is a recurring element to embellish furniture, fabrics and wallpapers.
One of the most prolific authors of the Wiener Werkstätte, of which he was also the director, Dagobert Peche produced about 45 designs for fabrics and wallpapers. Claudia, one of the most famous of these, perfectly illustrates the plurality of underlying iconographic references, from classicism to Biedermeier, while standing out for the clear synthesis and formal quality expressed through the abstractness of planes and contours.
Brazilliance is the first tropical explosion celebrated by wallpaper. It employs the botanical theme by changing its latitude and magnifying the banana leaf as a lush and vital expression of decorative maximalism. The paper was designed by Dorothy Draper for the lobby of the Californian hotel Arrowhead Springs and soon became a point of reference for a long series of followers inspired by the foliage of Caribbean and South American plants.
Designed for the atrium of Piero Fornasetti's house in Milan, this wallpaper is a hymn to the urban landscape and vernacular Mediterranean architecture. In the intricate juxtaposition of houses and buildings, all aimed at enhancing the smallest detail, it is the golden colour that brightens up the black and white of the drawing, highlighting the gentle curve of the domes.
An accurate depiction of a birch forest in the winter months and often used in children's rooms, Woods by Michael Clark has established itself over the years as a new classic because of its realistic depiction of the details of a natural environment. In addition to the classic original black and white version, it is also available in a wide range of colors.
Australian painter Florence Broadhurst, who created more than five hundred wallpaper designs, often referred to Japanese art, reinterpreting naturalistic motifs or drawing inspiration from abstract decorative elements. With Kabuki, the hand fan from the famous theatre play is re-proposed in a rigorous composition with a geometric line, one of the most famous pieces in Broadhurst's production.
Les Touches features one the most famous abstract motifs in the production of wallpaper of all time. With its soft repeating waves, this dotted pattern almost seems to refer to a very vague and indefinite decorative motif. Timeless and versatile, it is available in a wide range of colors.
A reproduction of an 18th-century chinoiserie-style wallpaper in the home of Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, the St. Laurent design, rigorously hand-painted on Xuan paper in Shanghai by the French brand de Gournay, comes to life on full-size papers that stand out like domestic frescoes.
Artists Silvia Quintanilla and Francesco Rugi play with overlapping patterns in primary colors to give lysergic depth to the drawings of Ulissa Aldrovandi, Carlo Linneo, and Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre, reproduced here on a large scale to reinforce their evocative effect.
Originally commissioned by curator Suzanne Oxenaar to decorate a temporary hotel in Tokyo, this wallpaper was originally conceived by Richard Hutten as a succession of strips of tape with different motifs covering all the surfaces of the room, and was only later transformed into a single roll. His taste for everyday symbols and words, here combined in a spontaneous and almost random way, underlines the wallpaper's good-natured pop character, bringing it closer to the aesthetics of a temporary installation.
The Antwerp-based studio's maximalist decorativism is best expressed in Alt Deutsch, a wallpaper that playfully re-proposes a selection of motifs from their archive. The intricate composition, which is nine meters long with absolutely no repetition of figures, is emphasized by the black outline around each element, while the Gothic aura is demolished, at a closer look, by the ironic and irreverent pop taste of the individual designs.
Printed with conductive ink and connected to an external control box, this musical wallpaper can be activated by touching it with your hand, transforming the walls of the room into a sound playground to be explored and personalized thanks also to music tracks that can be downloaded from the dedicated website.
This experimental wallpaper, developed by the American company twenty2 together with the Pratt Institute, reproduces the design of a cactus, adding depth through the use of staggered colour levels. In order to admire its three-dimensional effect, it is necessary to wear special glasses equipped with two complementary colour filters.
A reinterpretation of the terrazzo effect that has had such a strong influence on interior design in recent years, Clean-up is distinguished by its composition of vertical and diagonal lines that stand out against a grit background. Conceived for the bathroom, the wallpaper is provided with a fiberglass waterproofing sheath to withstand humid environments.
Luna II is an extremely large vinyl wallpaper (1 meter x 1 meter) that brings a particularly light feel to the room. Its abstract pattern, inspired by Atlantic nights, combines dark patches of colour and vibrant hints of colour that stand out against a white background.
Inspired by the tiles that can be found in almost every Mediterranean home, this wallpaper hand-painted in a mixed technique gives depth to the room thanks to the three-dimensional effect of the cubes that betray geometric rigor through variations in size and inclination.