Great Lengths: The Story of Handmade Wallpaper

About 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, French-made 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 a Jane Street property 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.

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 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.”

When something is handmade, it is the ways in which it falls short of perfect geometry that give it character
Dominic Evans-Freke

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 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.

STOCKIST INFORMATION
Wallpapers: Gracie www.graciestudio.com de Gournay www.degournay.com Fromental www.fromental.co.uk  Furniture and accessories: Petal side table from www.fashionforhome.co.uk Bottle vases from www.sophiecook.comBoundary 300 pendant light from www.scp.co.uk Lyle console table in walnut and limestone from www.conranshop.co.uk Ceramics from www.timeasido.co.uk Fan dining chair in natural, and fan stool from www.tomdixon.net Tea cup and saucer, from a selection at www.wedgwood.co.uk