Wallpapers

“I was delighted when I was approached a few years ago by Graduate Collection with a view to designing some artists’ wallpapers.  Put simply, I love wallpaper!  I realized as I started to work on some designs how much I have always been slightly obsessed by it.  It is the first thing I look at when I go to people’s houses.  I must seem very rude as I stare at their walls.  I remember the wallpapers long after I have forgotten the people who put them on those walls.  I can recall just about every wallpaper I have ever lived with.   And most of the wallpapers I have encountered over the years in hotels.  Those gi-normous parrots, for example, at Chalon-sur-Saone (the birthplace of photography); that busy roofscape imitating the roofs outside in an (expensive but delightfully shabby) attic room in Paris.  Montmartre, of course. 

“This longstanding interest is probably because of strong childhood memories of my mother constantly changing the wallpaper in our North London semi-detached.  Sometimes every week.  It occasionally felt like every night.  I would come home from school, or wake up in the morning, and find my father – with barely suppressed ill temper  – perched up a ladder, bucket of paste in one hand, wide gunky glue brush in the other, and my mother gaping furiously at the walls, fretting over the new paper that was half way covering the old one; invariably deciding that she probably preferred the one he had put up three weeks before but which was now long since covered over and irretrievable.  Any comment from me usually resulted in a ‘clip round the ear’, first from her, and then – when I protested vociferously – from him.  I used, though, to enjoy making wallpaper parcels out of the pasted, cut strips left lying around.  And I also used to enjoy the Saturday morning expeditions to the wallpaper showroom where (unlike my bored siblings) I would paw through the enormous sample books of wallpapers almost as obsessively as my poor mother.  Not that she ever sought, or listened to my opinions on the patterns.  She had her own strong preferences.  And the house, with every wall completely different and changing all the time, was testimony to her busy and wildly eclectic taste.  Now, of course, I understand she was probably expressing her dissatisfaction with life, and with being stuck with four children before the age of thirty.  She obviously hoped she could make her lot better and happier by changing the walls.  And she had a point.  You can completely transform a room, and your mood, and your whole outlook on life, by getting the wallpaper right….”

​© Charlotte Cory 2018