Floral Wallpaper: A Look Back at the Future of Design
Until recently, floral wallpaper had been relegated to the periphery of interior design, consigned to an "old-fashioned" aesthetic: it appears to evoke either the quaint attic room of an English bed-and-breakfast or the peeling walls of a long-abandoned house. In any case, it has an undeniably old character; to the modern consumer, it is a staid relic from a bygone era. These new styles breathe new life into a long and storied tradition that is nearly as old as civilization itself. The origins and evolution of floral wallpaper are hazy at best; it is a particularly fragile artefact , frequently hidden beneath layers of paint or more fashionable decor. The earliest, most primitive versions of floral wallpaper can be traced back to cave paintings, when humans would decorate walls with what they saw around them (typically animals, but in some places natural motifs). A more formal, genealogical history of wallpaper begins in China in 105 B.C.E., shortly after the invention of...