Wallpaper sample Sörgården green 50 cm.

Wallpaper sample 50 cm.

Printed paper wallpaper in a warm beige shade with a classy little checkered pattern in light red and yellowish tones. Printed in the traditional way in old rollers, one color at a time. Straight pattern fit. Very good light fastness and wipeable. The wallpapers are applied edge to edge or with a wire edge. Edge-cut. Not pre-pasted.

This particular wallpaper originally hung on the walls of a farm office at Wirum manor in Småland, and the date should be around 1880. It may be justified to point out that the wallpaper was on the walls, because small-patterned wallpapers often ended up on the ceiling in the gloomy, over-decorated interiors of the late 19th century. As wallpaper on the walls of simple cottages, or rooms such as farmhouses, kitchens and chambers, “The Farm Office” is an unbeatable mood creator along with white boarded ceilings, shed floors and rather dark carpentry.

Wallpaper history. It was not until the latter part of the 19th century that wallpaper became the property of every man. Poor families often bought thin, single-color wallpapers for their walls, known as 25-penny wallpapers. Rich families with large houses and apartments could instead excel with lots of patterns and colors in their rooms. But what really separated the rich from the poor was not the patterns, which were quite similar from one castle to the next, but the number of colors. The more colors, the more expensive the wallpaper was the rule. And the same rule still applies today.

In the late 19th century, a clear hierarchy emerged between different wallpaper patterns. In fine rooms such as the dining room and drawing room, the large-patterned wallpapers came in many shades of color, even gold. In simple spaces such as the kitchen and hallway, the small-patterned wallpapers came in instead.

“Farstun” is a typical Hälsingland stencil wallpaper from the last half of the 19th century. The era is known in Sweden as the Karl Johan period and had a penchant for silk-imitating patterns in sober colors. But very few could afford such silk wallpapers. Most had to make do with imitations, usually in the form of stencilled patterns in glue paint on rag paper. The middle classes of the population, priests and burghers, were also unable to afford expensive silk damask, but instead turned to local painters who became masters at imitating fabric patterns using stencils and silk-like colors. Finally, farmers also embraced the fashion for silk wallpaper, but translated the wallpaper patterns into bright vernacular colors. We have found this wallpaper in several farms in the Järvsö area where the color scheme blue, gray, red is the most common and the wallpaper that most closely resembles the farmers’ traditional colors. The more subdued color schemes in the catalog, on the other hand, are more typical of the 19th century and the Karl Johan era. Stenciled wallpaper is almost always combined with a single-color breast panel up to window height, made of wood or gray rag paper. This gives the rooms a sense of calm and harmonious proportions, even if the wallpaper patterns happen to be wild and colorful.