Wallpaper is making a comeback.
Especially since May, when a clutch of talented young designers unveiled their offerings at New York’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair, the country’s premier venue for cutting-edge furnishings.
“There was a real sense of excitement, a younger generation treating it in a completely different way than the staid, conventional patterns we’ve seen for so long,” says Arlene Hirst, a senior editor at Metropolitan Home. “It was witty, and it was fun.”
Full of color, offbeat materials and droll, superscale graphics and design motifs, the new patterns were less about putting something pretty on the wall and more about making a statement. Goodbye ditsy daisies. Hello jumbo punctuation marks, Doppler radar dots and seven-foot forks and spoons. Glossy decorating magazines took note and gave the new papers a ton of ink. Newsweek weighed in, declaring white walls and Zen-like minimalism so yesterday.
Target snapped up paint-by-numbers gerbera daisy wallpaper from 2Jane, an importer of cool British home furnishings (www.2jane.com) and featured it on its Red Hot Shop online site.
Technical innovations and the recent spurt of interest have been a shot in the arm for an industry in the doldrums since the early 1980s, when homeowners weary of pattern fled to the relative safety of paint.
“People just stopped using wallcoverings,” says Nick Cichielo, CEO of the Paint and Decorating Retailers’ Association. “In 1983, U.S. sales were $4.2 billion, and by 2003, the figure was $1.03 billion,” he says. “Sales dropped 75 percent in 20 years”–19.9 percent between 2001 and 2003.
Even so, he is cautiously optimistic. “We’ve seen an uptick since January. Our projections are that 2004 will be a break-even year.”
Big names have given business a boost in the past: Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol and Frank Lloyd Wright all designed wallpapers. Over the past three years, Wolf-Gordon, a New York contract firm known for innovative wallcoverings, has brought in major-leaguers such as New York product designer Karim Rashid and Miami architect Laurinda Spear. Scalamandre, a high-end source for designer textiles and paper, has lined up fashion force Kate Spade.
Add aggressive marketing, professional trade shows such as ICFF, and crowds standing in line for exhibits at New York’s Neue Galerie and the Rhode Island Museum of Design in Providence, and wallpaper’s future appears a bit rosier.
Jon Sherman, founder of New Orleans-based Flavor Paper, is characteristic of the new breed of wallpaper artisans. He took his hand-screened psychedelic patterns called Flower of Love and Highway 66 to ICFF and is now fielding orders right and left (www.flavorpaper.com).
A sampling of Flavor Paper’s palette includes Sweet Potato on Silver, Radicchio on Chrome and Roquefort on Gravy, a custom version of Highway 66 for the New Orleans pad of Lenny Kravitz.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com)
