A short history of wallpaper in New York interiors

Wallpaper has been part of how New Yorkers dress their rooms for as long as there have been fashionable New York rooms, and the city holds one of the great records of that history in a museum on the Upper East Side.

In the Federal era, the well-off New York townhouse looked to France. French scenic wallpapers, elaborate panoramic prints that wrapped a room in a continuous landscape, were imported as luxury goods and hung in entry halls and dining rooms: an early version of the immersive mural the trade still sells today. These were expensive, aspirational, and unmistakably a status object, and surviving examples are now treasured artifacts. The most famous American example is not in New York but in Washington: in 1961 Jacqueline Kennedy had an antique French scenic paper, "Views of North America," printed by the Zuber firm in the 1830s, installed in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, where it still hangs. It is the clearest proof of how far these papers traveled and how long they last.

By the Gilded Age, industrial printing had made patterned wallpaper widely available, and the dense, layered wall treatments of the late nineteenth century filled brownstones and apartments across the city. The reform movements that followed, including the taste for simpler, flatter, more stylized pattern associated with the Arts and Crafts era, reshaped what fashionable walls looked like, and New York interiors moved with those currents as they crossed from England and the Continent.

The twentieth century ran through the full cycle more than once: the exuberant papers of the postwar decades, the pared-back walls of mid-century modernism that treated pattern as suspect, and the periodic revivals that brought it back. Each swing left its mark on the city's apartments, and a New York renovation still routinely uncovers a forgotten layer of a previous era's wallpaper under the paint.

The institution that anchors this history sits on Fifth Avenue at 91st Street. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum was founded in 1897 by Sarah, Eleanor, and Amy Hewitt, granddaughters of the industrialist Peter Cooper, became part of the Smithsonian in 1967, and is housed in the former Andrew Carnegie mansion. Its holdings include one of the country's most significant collections of wallcoverings: historic papers, sample books, and design documents spanning centuries. That a museum devoted partly to wallpaper sits in a New York mansion is not a coincidence. It is the same city, and often the same neighborhood, where the fashionable papers of each era were hung in the first place, which means choosing a pattern for a New York wall today lands inside a tradition the museum a few blocks away has been collecting for more than a century.