New wallpaper designs are all about making a statement

It may be less insistent than cicadas, but wallpaper is definitely getting buzz. Especially since May, when a clutch of talented young designers and entrepreneurial types with audacious ideas and catchy company names unveiled their offerings at New York’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), the country’s premier venue for cutting-edge furnishings. Though several had shown their stuff at the furniture fair before, wallpaper as an avant-garde design medium seemed to reach critical mass this spring. “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, super-scale 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 7-foot forks and spoons. Some designs recalled op and pop art of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Some had the intensity of Summer of Love acid trips.

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. Mass marketers were paying attention. 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 and paint faux effects.

“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 alone.

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 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 former real-estate developer, Sherman saw samples of shiny ‘70s papers a year ago when their creator, an Oregonian known only as Ted, had died and his archives were about to be torched by his relatives. Working against the clock, Sherman rescued 300 of the original designs, invested in new equipment, quit his day job and updated Ted’s handiwork in fresh colors.

“People looked at me like I had three heads when I told them I was thinking about bringing back funky designs on Mylar,” says Sherman, 32. “Everybody said, ‘Who uses wallpaper?’ “

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 rocker Lenny Kravitz.

The New York event showcased other brash idea factories: Timorous Beasties of Edinburgh with op-arty zigzags, Doppler dots and larger-than-life thistles ( www.timorousbeasties.com); London-based Tracy Kendall experimenting with hand-stitched sequins, fluttery paper squares and shreds, and huge flowers, feathers and silverware ( www.tracykendall.com); Knoll Textiles with “Pause,” enormous punctuation marks by the New York graphic design firm 2x4 ( www.knoll.com); and Brooklyn-based Twenty2 with printed geometrics and ginkgo leaves on Mylar ( www.shoptwenty2.com).

Product designer Jaime Salm of Philadelphia-based Mio brought “V2,” wallpaper tiles of molded cardboard that can be painted and installed temporarily with two-sided tape ( www.mioculture.com).

“They’re beyond wallpaper. I’m sorry we didn’t think of them ourselves,” says Ignaz Gorischek, vice president of visual planning for Neiman Marcus, which next month will feature the tiles in fall window displays.

Gregory Herringshaw is assistant curator at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, where he heads the country’s largest wallpaper archive: 10,000 documents. Part of the excitement at the furniture fair this year, he says, was that “these are mostly smaller companies producing a handmade product. … They’re very individual, very high quality. Most are made to order, not printed en masse.”

In general, it costs more to wallpaper a room than to paint it, especially if professionally installed, and the prices of these wallcoverings fall in a wide range. At $28 for a box of a dozen 12-inch squares, Mio’s “V2” is the least expensive. Others average from $100 to $300 per roll — high compared with $18 to $40 for most mass-produced lines.

Beyond price, wallpaper is a commitment. It takes skill and experience to put up and is a chore to take down. Even those marketed as strippable tend to hang in there. This is another issue the industry is seeking to address.

“Our new Waverly 4 is so easy to remove that you just grab a corner and peel it off when you want to get rid of it,” says Kathy O’Brien, vice president of marketing for FSC, the wallpaper division of F. Schumacher & Co., Waverly’s parent.

For the installation-challenged, there’s Paper Illusion from FSC’s Village line. “In-house, we describe it as ‘rip and stick.’ It’s a faux-finish design that you tear into pieces, dip into water and slap on the wall,” she says. “You don’t even have to measure or use scissors.”

Washington designer Chad Alan was thrilled when client Steve Palmer of Alexandria, Va., accepted a bold proposal to paper the cathedral ceiling in his family room with a large-scale spiral pattern encrusted with a sandy substance. “That ceiling is the largest plane in the room and to leave it all white would be incredibly boring,” says Alan.

“When Chad told me he wanted to paper the ceiling, I said ‘Pardon me?’ But I really like it,” Palmer says. “When it’s finished it will be quite dramatic.” Alan suggested a super-size paisley for Palmer’s tiny bathroom. “It’s an updated David Hicks design from the ‘60s, I found at Cole & Son in London. Each paisley is at least three feet high.”

Some of the new wallcoverings out there are tempting even designers who wouldn’t have considered using them before. “I always avoided wallpaper because it seemed so artificial. The seams bothered me,” says Sophie Prevost of Cole-Prevost, a progressive design and architecture firm in Washington. “But some of the things at ICFF were very interesting. I really liked Tracy Kendall’s papers,” she says, noting one design resembling stuck-on Post-its and another adorned with large pastel sequins. “Seams wouldn’t matter.”

Bud Yeck, a partner in the Mill Company of Falls Church, Va., who was also at ICFF, isn’t so sure about those sequins. “Ha!” he says. “Hear that sucking sound? What do you think will happen if you get to close to them with a vacuum cleaner?”