When John Nicolson bought his house on Fournier St., London in 1995 it was derelict, repossessed and rotting. He embarked on a decade-long renovation and, along with many discoveries he found layers of wallpaper dating from 1690 until 1960. The oldest piece of wallpaper was already thirty years old when it was pasted onto the walls of the new house built by joiner William Taylor in 1721. Nicholson ensured that no materials left the building and painstakingly salvaged all the fragments of wallpaper. He keeps his collection of wallpaper preserved between layers of tissue in chronological order, revealing both the history and tastes of his predecessors and the story of English wallpaper – through examples from a single house.
 |
| Fragments from the seventeen-twenties |
 |
| Wallpaper by William Morris, 1880 |
 |
| Modernist design by Finnish designer Eliel Saarinen from the nineteen-twenties |
 |
| Vinyl wallpaper from the nineteen-sixties |
Read the entire story at
Spitalfields Life. It's fascinating.
No comments:
Post a Comment