Le plaisir est inside - Kitchens and Bathrooms

It's had its ups and downs. Adored, detested, fashionable one moment and dated the next, everyone has an opinion on wallpaper! With the benefit of the latest technological advances and the remarkable imagination of the designers, this special roll of paper has plenty of life in it yet…

Wallpaper: what a story!

Decorating walls is a tradition dating back to the Egyptian and Roman murals. Not forgetting the Chinese who used sheets of rice paper painted with a pattern: birds, flowers and landscapes. In the Middle Ages, wallpaper became a cheap "substitute" for luxurious cloth tapestries or wood panelling. Wallpaper started to become popular, especially in Europe. Not only decorative, it also provided protection from the damp. Use of wallpaper became so widespread that in 1712, England imposed a tax on any paper which was "painted, printed or stained to serve as hangings". Despite this tax, the industry continued to develop and by 1839 printing machines could produce infinite lengths of paper.

In 19th century England, wallpaper was classified into two categories: simple and complex! The 'simple' paper had a repeated geometric design printed using a wooden block. The 'complex' paper, for its part, offered a more complicated design, with vases or flowers created by several different blocks. Some even had three-dimensional patterns, creating a trompe-l'œil effect, a very popular technique in France.

Two men marked the history of wallpaper in France: Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, who developed the manufacture and sale of wallpapers with repetitive patterns between 1765 and 1789 and Jean Zuber, who in 1830 invented a machine which could manufacture continuous lengths of paper. Innovations followed on rapidly from that time and wallpaper became an integral part of interior design.

Revolutionary and popular, wallpaper has nonetheless been through some very dark times. And very recently, during the 1980's, there was an almost total lack of interest in this decorative "touch". Why? Probably because of the 1970s fashion for psychedelic paper, highly-coloured (red, orange, brown…) and always in very striking geometric patterns. After the end of the Pop era, the new decorative trend was for minimalism and Zen. Paint won the day on wallpaper which fell out of favour. Until the year 2000…

When design took on the walls

Some people say they prefer paint to wallpaper. Why? Because it's much easier to slap a bit of paint on a wall than cover it with paper … But technology has produced some wonderful innovations, for example "non-woven" paper, invented in 1999. This requires 30 % less time to hang compared with a standard paper. No need to paste the sheets before hanging, you simply apply the paste directly onto the wall and forget about those dreadful wallpaper tables! Wallpapering a room measuring 5 metres by 4 only takes 2 hours. Plus, the paper is much stronger as it is impermeable, so it can be removed dry in a couple of movements.

Then there's the digital revolution! Nowadays, thanks to digital printing, you can put any pattern you choose onto non-woven wallpaper, illustrations, photos, drawings... So go ahead, release your inner artist!