going to great lengths

INTERIOR DECORATION
HANDMADE WALLPAPER
GOING
T O G R E AT
LENGTHS
WALLPAPERS FROM FROMENTAL, WWW.FROMENTAL.CO.UK – FERN IN MAHOGANY (LEFT) AND PRUNUS IN BITUMEN (RIGHT), FROM £335 ($515) PER SQ M HAND-PAINTED / £560 ($860) PER SQ M HAND-EMBROIDERED;
FAN DINING CHAIR IN NATURAL, £545 ($837), AND FAN STOOL, £350 ($538), TOM DIXON, WWW.TOMDIXON.NET; TEACUP AND SAUCER, FROM A SELECTION, WEDGWOOD, WWW.WEDGWOOD.CO.UK.
Intricate embroidery adorns
Fromental’s elegant silk-backed
wallpapers, with designs such as
Fern (left) and Prunus (right).
It can take up to 21,000 hours to produce enough handmade
wallpaper to cover a medium-sized room. The stunning results
when it is hung, however, last a lifetime
BY R ACH EL LO O S
P I C T U R ES A D R I A N B R I S CO E
A
bout 60 miles west of the soaring steel
skyscrapers and high-tech modernity of
Shanghai, in an area surrounding the city of
Suzhou, with its peaceful gardens and ornate pagodas,
are the ateliers of China’s best painters of silk and paper.
Here, as they and their forebears have done for the past
1,500 years, craftsmen and women patiently take 100 or
more brush strokes to create a single leaf, spend hours
delicately shading the wings of a bird, or half a day
carefully embroidering the petals of a cherry blossom
branch with the finest silk thread.
This artistry once made scrolls and screens for
China’s wealthy governing Mandarin class and its richer
merchants, and the designs were symbolic displays of
rank; a fiery dragon denoted power, a blossoming peony,
wealth and beauty. Today, however, these skills are
used to create exquisite hand-painted wallpaper that
decorates homes around the globe, with the designs
now chosen for their depth of beauty and standout style.
This is very different to how it all began – wallpaper
was originally used by the poorer classes as a cheap
alternative to paneling and tapestry. By the 1700s,
however, wallpaper designs had become more elaborate
and “painted paper”, as it was called, had come in to
vogue among the wealthy, too, with the English and
French vying for design supremacy. In the US, where
the wallpaper industry was still in its infancy, Frenchmade arabesque papers of urns, medallions, and foliage
were particularly popular. When, in 1790, Thomas
Jefferson returned to Virginia from Paris after his
post as US Ambassador to France, he ordered dozens
of rolls of French wallpaper to bring home with him.
It was at this time that Chinese papers, or chinoiserie
(from chinois, the French word for “Chinese”), started to
be exported to the West, and the wonderfully detailed
birds, flowers, trees, and scenes of Chinese life were
an immediate hit – as they remain today, some 200
years later, with chinoiserie continuing to be the most
sought-after style of hand-painted wallpaper. Still
crafted in China, the high level of artistry and work
required – it takes 700 hours to create a set of 20
chinoiserie panels for a medium-sized room – ensures
it remains a luxury product.
Hand-painted wallpaper, however, comes in a number
of styles, from plain to lightly patterned and embossed,
as well as adorned with European and American
landscapes. In a historic property that has been given
a modern renovation, handmade wallpaper can be >
a clever way of nodding to the past, as seen at 42 Jane
Street in New York City’s West Village. Adjoining the
contemporary-styled living room is a small parlor,
the walls of which feature silk wallpaper with a wisteria
pattern flowing down from the ceiling and koi carp
swimming up from the floor. “It’s an excellent device to
open the room optically as the eye travels up and down
and also moves around the room,” says Anne Collins,
Vice President of Brown Harris Stevens Residential
Sales, an exclusive affiliate of Christie’s International
Real Estate, who is marketing the property.
CHANGING FORTUNES
However, the 20th century has not always been kind
to handmade wallpaper, as Gracie, the oldest existing
manufacturer of handmade wallpaper in the world, can
testify. Founded in New York in 1898 by Charles Gracie,
the business expanded its interest from Asian antiques
to chinoiserie in 1927 after a textile trader returned
from China with hand-painted wallpapers discovered
in a Beijing studio. A relationship with the studio was
established, but the following decades were tough
as the company battled through the Depression and
World War II trade embargoes. In 1949, the Communist
Revolution forced the studio to relocate to Taiwan.
Today, Gracie’s studio is back in mainland China,
near Shanghai. Run by Charles Gracie’s grandchildren
Mike Gracie and his sister Jennifer, the company offers
50 or so chinoiserie designs as well as bespoke patterns.
Clients include The White House, the Estée Lauder
Below: Striking designs and gilded
papers have ensured de Gournay
is increasingly recognized for its
Japanese and Korean collection.
<#L.L#> www.christiesrealestate.com
family, and a number of high-profile interior designers.
“There is always a certain market for hand-painted
wallpaper,” says Gracie. “Certainly, though, we are
having a very good moment now. Real estate is doing
well and owners are redoing houses, and people want
pretty rather than edgy.”
Unlike printed paper in which one pattern is repeated,
chinoiserie and landscape scenes feature a mural across
a wall or throughout a room. Custom-made, the size and
scale are a perfect fit to a room; smaller rooms work
best with a more exuberant pattern for the full effect of
a design, and in spacious rooms strongly colored pattern
is needed to hold the large space.
Painted onto silk that has been treated with a
hardening glue and then backed with rice paper,
a design is created in a series of paneled sections that
arrive in rolls to be hung on the wall in the same way
as printed wallpaper. The design is first hand-sketched
and then painted, the color and detail painstakingly
built up layer by layer – it is this that gives the paper
its exceptional depth and texture. As it is fabric, it also
softens the acoustics of a room.
MANY HANDS…
To be painted, the silk is stretched onto a frame and laid
on a long table, where it is worked on by a small team
of painters. This creates the slight differences in style
and tone that are part of what makes hand-painted
wallpaper so special. “When something is made by hand,
by a craftsman, it is the ways in which it falls short of
perfect geometry and color reproduction that give it
character and life,” says Dominic Evans-Freke, a director
at de Gournay, a leading English hand-painted wallpaper
company that has been favored by a number of high-end
brands including Tiffany and Hermès, as well as actress
Gwyneth Paltrow, who chose de Gournay hand-painted
wallpaper for her London home.
The company was founded in 1986, by Evans-Freke’s
“very eccentric, but also very entrepreneurial” uncle,
who, unable to restore the existing chinoiserie in his
London home, decided to source it new himself. Today
the company is known for its chinoiserie but also the
Japanese and Korean collection, which features striking
designs (plum blossom, koi carp) set against hand-gilded
gold and silver paper-backed silk backgrounds.
Ironically, although produced in China, chinoiserie
was purely for export to the West and until 10 or so
years ago was almost unknown in wider China. Today
it is considered a luxury Western product. “Now we’re >
OPPOSITE: WALLPAPERS FROM DE GOURNAY, WWW.DEGOURNAY.COM – CHELSEA IN DUCK EGG (LEFT) AND FISHES IN LEAD GREY AND PEARLESCENT ANTIQUED (RIGHT);
LYLE CONSOLE TABLE IN WALNUT AND LIMESTONE, £1,995 ($3,065), THE CONRAN SHOP, WWW.CONRANSHOP.CO.UK; CERAMICS, FROM £20 ($31), TIMEA SIDO, WWW.TIMEASIDO.CO.UK.
INTERIOR DECORATION
HANDMADE WALLPAPER
De Gournay’s Chelsea design (left)
from the Chinoiserie collection, and
Fishes (right) from the Japanese
and Korean collection.
Hand-painted Chinese scenic
wallpaper designs from Gracie’s
extensive collection feature
antiqued backgrounds.
OPPOSITE: WALLPAPERS FROM GRACIE, WWW.GRACIESTUDIO.COM – HAND-PAINTED CHINESE SCENES SY-234 ON ANTIQUED SILVER LEAF BACKGROUND (LEFT) AND SY-200 (RIGHT), FROM $900 PER PANEL; PETAL SIDE
TABLE, £199 ($306), FASHION FOR HOME, WWW.FASHIONFORHOME.CO.UK; BOTTLE VASES, FROM £120 ($184), SOPHIE COOK, WWW.SOPHIECOOK.COM; BOUNDARY 300 PENDANT LIGHT, £245 ($376), SCP, WWW.SCP.CO.UK.
INTERIOR DECORATION
HANDMADE WALLPAPER
starting to see it in commercial projects in China but
the design choices are conservative – cherry blossom
and large peony flowers,” says Douglas Bray, managing
director of the Americas for the Chinese company
Griffin & Wong, a newcomer that aims to do chinoiserie
differently. “Most chinoiserie is a pretty loyal
reproduction of 18th-century designs; we want to do
stuff that is more fun and sexy,” says Bray. One of its
first designs is Baltazar, with a background of a fading
night sky with mythical birds flying amongst ducks,
songbirds, and hummingbirds.
British company Fromental – whose clients include
Chanel, hotels such as the Bel-Air in Los Angeles, and
designers David Collins and David Tang – has taken
hand-painted wallpaper a step further by adding
embroidery. First introduced as stitched stripes, it is
now part of the chinoiserie range too. “If it takes 30
hours to paint one panel, to fully embroider the same
panel takes 300 hours,” says the company’s founder and
creative director, Tim Butcher, who has a background
in fashion. “It needs a remarkable level of skill as the
tension of the stitching has to be completely even.”
Most often, embroidery is kept to details such as petals
or seeds, but, says Butcher, “We can also add all manner
of other things, such as gilding with precious metal,
beading, or crystals.”
Fromental has also created modern hand-painted silk
designs that are a world away from chinoiserie: Ponti,
for example, with its interlocking geometric shapes
resembling marquetry, which was first designed for a vast
floating wall in a double-height space of a modern house.
Handmade wallpaper is also effective at adding texture
to a single color. As with hand-painted silk wallpaper,
the application by hand of Venetian plaster onto paper
comes from a longstanding tradition, but the result is
quite different. Here, plaster is mixed with marble dust,
then applied in thin, multiple layers before being
burnished to create a smooth surface with the illusion
of depth and texture. Once applied directly to walls,
today it can be bought as wallpaper, with such papers
from New York’s Studio E – part of EverGreene, a leader
in onsite-applied decorative surface finishes, whose
clients include Louis Vuitton, Saks, and Elton John
– costing around $58-$77 per yard. “We found there
was a demand for hand-applied finishes to be more
‘portable’,” says the studio’s Denise Vasaya. “And the
wallpaper version looks as beautiful, instantly elevating
an entire space, but is less costly and better-wearing.”
British designer Tracy Kendall, meanwhile, has gone
for high impact. With a background in both fashion and
fine art, her designs marry the disciplines to create
almost three-dimensional designs for commercial spaces
and homes (they are also in the permanent collections
at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York).
For Sequins, hundreds of large sequins are carefully
spaced then attached to paper using a hand-gun. The
result is a tactile and eye-catchingly glittery surface.
Firing a hand-gun is a long way from the fine art
of chinoiserie, but both styles carry the trademark of
bespoke craftsmanship, which is what gives handmade
wallpaper the power to lift a room from the attractive
into the extraordinary.
Rachel Loos writes for The Daily Telegraph and The Times,
and is former editor of Elle Decoration UK.
ON THE MARKET
Homes with wonderful walls
42 JANE STREET
Manhattan, New York, USA
Juxtaposing historic charm and
contemporary cool, this five-story
townhouse boasts eye-catching
features including a roof terrace with
Manhattan views and hand-painted
silk wallpaper in the parlor (left).
$11,900,000
Contact: Anne Collins,
+1 212 906 0510, [email protected]
BOGARDUS HALL
Amenia, New York, USA
Overlooking Webatuck Creek, this
restored six-bedroom Georgian
property features a hand-painted
mural depicting the Hudson Valley.
$10,500,000
Contact: John R Friend, +1 845 677
6161, [email protected],
Deborah Montgomery, dmontgomery
@houlihanlawrence.com
www.christiesrealestate.com <#R.R#>