Sunday 3 August 2008

Papering over the cracks

The French have the same passion for wallpaper that the English have. (This is something a bit foreign to Australians, so we notice it.)

Our front room had dry lining that was wallpapered. What we weren't expecting (once we had removed the dry lining) was to find another 3 layers (and evidence of more) on the walls under the lining. Unfortunately, I was in "doing stuff frenzy" mode when I was working on the front room, so the removal of wallpaper wasn't as systematically archaeological as it could have been.

These are, however, the wallpapers we have:

This is the first layer, pasted directly on white plastered walls
Layer 2

The third layer (with evidence of layer 4 at the top)
The dry lining

Luckily, when we bought our house, although it had wallpaper, none of the rooms had wallpaper across the ceiling. This is something I have only seen in France, and is usually done with psychedelic floral prints from the 1980s - up one wall, across the ceiling, and down the other side.

We will not be papering at all. The walls will be drylined with plasterboard and limewashed. We will be attempting to do taste...........


Simon

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Simon, those of us in your "audience" who have interior decorating leanings ...thank you !!

Ken Broadhurst said...

There's no accounting for taste and styles. Our house in Saint-Aignan had -- and part still has -- very busy wall paper on several walls AND ceilings. Some say we should preserve it as a tribute to the Frenchness of the house. If we could figure out how to get it off the ceiling 20 feet over our main staircase, we would do it. Meantime, we just admire it.

Some of the samples you show look pretty nice, actually.

Simon said...

I actually dont mind the third layer - the one with the swags at the top.

I'm still resistant to the idea of wallpaper though - it just doesn't tick my boxes.

I am glad to hear that it has fans though - especially the wallpaper equivalent of a combover... It's great to see - in someone else's house!

S

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