
The Great Wallpaper Rebellion: Defending Flamboyance in a World of White Walls - hoffmannesque
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-great-wallpaper-rebellion/
======
olliej
When we were looking at buying a house one of the weirdest things we
encountered was that it doesn’t seem to occur to people to repaint or
wallpaper houses they’re buying.

I literally heard people saying they weren’t going to buy a house because they
didn’t like the wall colours. From our realtor we found that all agents will
prefer to repaint all houses to a plain pastel/beige interior. As a matter of
course. It was very strange.

~~~
megaman22
This always drive me bonkers watching shows like house hunters. People are
investing hundreds of thousands in a home, and do they ask about the big
structural details? No, they quibble about paint colors, or light fixtures, or
the curtains. All stuff that you can change, and easily.

~~~
jimmaswell
Likely exaggerated or even scripted to some extent to pad time for the
show/create tension.

~~~
cat199
All the better to make you feel smarter than they are,

get excited by the filthy lucre of 'flip this house' shows,

and then be super receptive to home improvement advertising.

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probably_wrong
This is the "why aren't Millennials buying cars?" discussion all over again,
probably instigated by the same PR firms.

> (...) wallpaper is a tough sell for those who tend to fill their homes with
> disposable furnishings from Wayfair and Ikea. Such consumers generally balk
> at spending $51 a yard to apply an 18-inch wide ribbon of “Kelmscott Frieze”
> (...) (plan on spending around $700, plus installation, for that little
> detail)

I don't own Ikea furniture and white walls because I like the minimalist looks
- I own Ikea furniture because I can't afford better, and I have white walls
because my landlord will force me to paint them back once I move. Buying a
house alone would be quite a stretch, and you bet I'd rather put those extra
$700 towards a proper table or, even better, my retirement.

Now, why aren't _rich_ people buying expensive wallpaper? No idea. But that
has nothing to do with the "Everybody hates wallpaper" that opens the article.

~~~
throwawayqdhd
There is a reason minimalism exploded in popularity at the same time as youth
poverty did.

In fact, whenever I've browsed the minimalism-inspired subreddits, I've always
made a game of it: minimalism or poverty?

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derefr
Is there a reason that wallpaper needs to be... paper? It seems to me that
much of the badness of wallpaper (e.g. that it can peel, stain, fade, etc.)
comes from the “paper” part. Why not, say, layered stencilled patterns of
airbrushed house paint?

~~~
freddie_mercury
People do stencils frequently, you can google all the opinions and resources
about it. Paint will stain & fade just the same as wellpaper will. Most people
will say that wallpaper lasts longer than paint. I think the biggest thing is
that putting on a new coat of paint is a lot easier, so people are more likely
to refresh paint than to refresh wallpaper. So you see a lot more really old
(and thus, bad looking) wallpaper than you do paint.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I wonder if peeling wallpaper looks worse/harder to fix than
stained/cracked/chipped/whatever paint.

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burfog
Trouble is, I can't be 100% sure to find the exact same wallpaper when I need
to patch it. I can go into any Home Depot or Walmart and get white paint.

To deal with this, I could try to keep a large supply of spare wallpaper.
Besides taking up space, the spare wallpaper will not age the same as the
wallpaper on the walls. When I try to use it, I'll discover that it now stands
out.

~~~
toomanybeersies
Also, it can be difficult to match up new patches of wallpaper so that it
actually blends in seamlessly with the old paper, even ignoring the age of the
wallpaper.

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raldi
The suit is back!

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

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xamuel
Is wallpaper really as hated as the opening paragraph makes it out to be? I
fell in love with wallpaper from watching "Yes Minister" which mostly takes
place in government offices with beautiful wallpaper.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYuoWyk8iU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYuoWyk8iU)

~~~
cat199
think this is a generational backlash.

50s: wallpaper

60s: modern/minimal

70s: mix

80s: wallpaper

90s/2000s: modern/minimal

now: back to wallpaper, apparrently

obviously this is oversimplifying the styles of the era, but yes.

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sandworm101
Ok. I see the appeal. Where can i buy modern wallpaper? Sure, it looks great
on old homes. It looks great on new home that are trying to look old. But
where are the designs that will look good in my home? I dont want star wars,
but nor do i want flowers.

Wallpaper had a construction purpose one upon a time. Now it is purely
decoration. So as art it needs to evolve. I have modern furniture in a modern
house. Show me something that isnt 19th or even 20th century.

~~~
dpark
> _Wallpaper had a construction purpose one upon a time. Now it is purely
> decoration._

When was wallpaper ever anything other than purely decorative?

~~~
sandworm101
Houses move. Wood expands and contracts with the seasons. Or foundations move
slightly. Plaster or other rigid coverings on walls then cracks. Wallpaper is
a cheap and easy way to add a somewhat more flexible layer that doesn't show
cracks so easily. And you can always put up new paper over the old. Lots of
stuff, ie crown molding and baseboards, appears as tools to hide the
inevitable cracks in walls.

Modern houses are much more ridged, mostly because they are more watertight.
Our wall finishes, paints overtop of plasterboard/drywall, are also more
flexible. The 'wallpaper' layer is now part of the plasterboard.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
> you can always put up new paper over the old

 _shudders_

Buy / borrow / rent a steamer!

~~~
namibj
Why? It's more expensive to do that. And there are many cases where that was
not done.

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extralego
Wallpaper has deep roots as a descendent of ancient Roman wall paintings and
frescos to follow. Even the content carries over almost unphased if you
consider Roman wall paintings to match the neovictorian styles we know of our
grandparents having and frescos to match the popular ikea-like full wall
coverings in the contemporary modern hotels.

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toomanybeersies
I think that a big part of what has killed wallpaper is that artwork that you
can hang on a wall has become much cheaper, which fulfills the purpose of
breaking up the wall and making it less drab and more interesting.

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graycat
"Wall paper"???????

Why wall paper??????

For what walls SHOULD look like, see

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8K3tnzcF0Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8K3tnzcF0Q)

There, where's the role for "wall paper"???

Uh, a first cut guess is that the building is

 _Deutsch: Kunsthistorisches Museum in Wien, davor der Maria-Theresien-platz
mit dem Maria-Theresien-Denkmal._

Gee, maybe could add some wall paper to

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Bundesar...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-F079088-0003%2C_W%C3%BCrzburg%2C_Residenz.jpg)

Think that would help?

As at

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%BCrzburg_Residence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%BCrzburg_Residence)

that is the main staircase of the

 _Würzburger Residenz_.

IIRC at the top of the staircase there is a big wall with no wall paper but
with a large painting by Tiepolo. Maybe they could fit some wall paper around
the painting? How about an improvement, wall paper OVER the painting????? :-)

~~~
PhasmaFelis
So your argument is "Instead of wallpaper, you should live in a solid marble
palace"?

A bit impractical for most, don't you think?

~~~
graycat
The work described in the OP is amazing, admittedly flamboyant!

But it's still wall paper!

It appears that my post was lost on some people at HN. The post had two
points:

(1) First, the architecture of the links I gave is astounding beyond belief.
Some of those guys in old Vienna and Würzburg went way over the top and then
higher still. If look in detail, it appears that they packed in as many ways
to spend money on astounding decorations as possible! For anyone with the
wealth of, say, the Holy Roman Empire to spend, it really is a cut above wall
paper! With some irony, one of the buildings was done in 1880, that is, about
the time of the Victorian Golden Age of the wall paper!

(2) The other point was that I was making joke. The humor is from the reader
seeing how unbelievably expensive those Vienna and Würzburg buildings must
have been in comparison even with expensive wall paper! Or, as part of the
joke, I was ignoring expenditures significant on the scale of Austria or
Germany.

> A bit impractical for most, don't you think?

Right, part of the joke.

Maybe one more point: As absurdly expensive as those buildings in Vienna and
Würzburg must have been, they are astounding accomplishments. I can think of
the many thousands of peasants who had to go hungry to pay for that
"flamboyance", but, still, the results are astounding. And the architects
didn't have computers to do the visualizations. The builders didn't have
lasers to do the alignments.

Maybe one more joke: How do they keep those buildings warm in a cold night in
a cold winter with three feet, uh, a meter, of snow on the ground? Or, all
that money spent but no good means of heating the place?

