The floors, the walls, the ceilings—time was when every home and public place sought to make them all beautiful. When prosperity grew throughout the 19th century, domestic and commercial places became ever more wonderful.
Wallpaper played a huge role in this, and this is for a reason. With papered walls, you could economize on wall hangings and furniture and every home could look like a palace.
That was the core of the American ideal, for every American family to have a castle, at least in the feel of it, similar to how royalty once lived in the Old World.
We were well on the way to achieving that too.
I was sitting happily in the bar of an old New England hotel and reflected on why it felt so darn comfortable. Yes, the fire was roaring and, yes, the wool rugs were gorgeous. But then I noticed the fine wallpaper.
I tried to imagine in my mind what the place would look like without it. It seemed barren in my imagination. The wallpaper provided the template of luxury for the entire experience.
Realizing this, I began to notice its absence in homes and public places. It is mostly gone completely, replaced by dull paint everywhere. White walls, gray walls, eggshell walls. Flat paint with no character. It’s a surface and nothing more. A big forever surface desolate of messaging, meaning, and imagination.
They say that it is easier to maintain that way. When there is a stain or a nick or scratch, you simply slap on some more paint. If it is flat, you don’t even have to blend it in.
Oh convenience! Oh practicality! Oh simplicity!
To tell you the truth, I’m sick of it all.
Recently I had the occasion to go to D.C. and I entered through Union Station. The place truly takes one’s breath away with its grandeur and magnificence. It’s hard to believe that something so wonderful could exist in our ugly times. The key is the ceiling. It’s inspiring at a level that is indescribable. I don’t think people even bother to decorate ceilings, whereas if you go to even the smallest pub built a century ago, the ceiling is exciting and pretty.
The wall problem is even worse because that’s where one’s eyes fall most of the time. We don’t even bother anymore. We just take out the bucket and brush and cover it all up, partly because we can do this ourselves and doing so requires no expertise. One trip to the big box hardware store, two buckets of paint, a few brushes, a few hours, and you are done, forever.
And, yes, these days, we move here and there. We flip houses and trade up apartments. We take new jobs in other cities. Always on the move. We cannot possibly be bothered to apply new paper to the walls.
After all, what if the new residents don’t like it? We live as if someone else will soon inhabit our dwellings, such that all decorations must be able to go into a truck or pod.
I get it but please understand what we have lost. We hang things everywhere because something about sterile and bland walls rightly upsets us, and drag these hangings from place to place. But actually, a wall that is properly papered with classic designs needs fewer or possibly no wall hangings because the wall itself becomes something to observe and inspire.
It’s not only convenience that ruins the place of wallpaper in our lives. It’s also philosophy. Following the second of two world wars in the course of half a century, it’s almost as if people gave up on creating spaces of beauty in general. Public buildings were “brutalist,” designed to survive a bombing and still function.
Worse still, they looked like prison camps because of some theory that all of life is implicitly a prison. That’s an interesting philosophy, worthy of dark absinthe-soaked weekend nights, but it is hardly an elevated aesthetic for public architecture. It represents the triumph of despair over hope.
This same theory invaded domestic spaces. Gone were the moldings. Gone were the decorated ceilings. Gone was the wallpaper. Gone were the ornate furniture pieces with clawed feet and intricate detail.
“Mid-Century modern” meant simple, stripped down, bereft of beauty, absent of meaning. Even today, most domestic environments lack moldings such that the walls meet the ceilings and floors exactly, with strict edges, all painted into nothingness like a prison cell.
The influence of the so-called Scandinavian look—as interpreted by American interior designers—did not help. IKEA came along and offered exactly what we needed: affordable things that end up in the trash bin when we are called to the next gig in the next town. This was all sold to us as a new aesthetic that invites us to live in a mental rather than physical space. This theory played well with the new fashion for moving all our valuables to the digital cloud.
Next thing you know, we strip our lives of anything physically meaningful, almost as if we had all become disciples of the Prophet Mani who regarded the material world as corrupt and only the spirit as pure. Gone were the pretty walls. Gone were the reminders of the capacity of human hands to make things that elevate. Gone were the ideals. Gone were the reminders of higher things in general.
No more talk of how God became man, thus blessing the world with divine affirmation. From now on, we will all dress only in disposable clothes, stare at screens, be surrounded by nothing, power lights with breezes and sunbeams, and eat bugs.
Why did we do this to ourselves? It might have just been one huge error but I suspect that it all traces to a kind of demoralization that fell upon human life after the second world war, a belief that the powers of the world do not really care about bringing dignity to life, so why should we care either?
You can detect this theory in everything from music to architecture to interior design.
I have no grand plan to bring back beauty and elevated sensibilities on a large scale. But I do know this. We can fix this where we live right now. We can start anywhere but one good place might be to look through eBay for beautiful wallpaper, purchase some, and employ an expert to put it in. It can be just the bathroom, just the bedroom, or go all out for the dining room.
It’s a small thing to do but it is also deeply symbolic. Making our own lives and living spaces wonderful is a means of fighting back. And let’s face it: you don’t really like living a sparse and barren existence inside rooms that feel like prisons, no matter how much fashionable writers at the New York Times tell you that you should.
Wallpaper makes rooms beautiful, as you can easily discover by looking at archival photos or touring homes of great men and women. I hear from designers and people in the renovation business that wallpaper is making a huge comeback. If so, it rather makes sense given my prevailing theory of our times: we are reverting by a century to find freedom, beauty, and spirituality again.
You can use AI to discover the look and feel, and dream about what could be.
