Reproduction wallpapers

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2001 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

As John Hermanson relates in his article "Careswell, the Historic Winslow House in Marshfield, Massachusetts," in this issue (pp. 312-319), the preservation movement in this country started in New England at the turn of the twentieth century. While standards of acceptable restoration have changed considerably over the years, the Winslow House has withstood the test of time better than some of its counterparts. Even in the early twentieth century it was fairly easy to determine what had originally covered the walls of a room simply by peeling hack the layers of wallpaper until one reached the bare wall.

As early as 1905, when Kate Sanborn's book Old Time Wall Papers was published, collectors and historic house curators had become the catalyst for a number of firms to include reproductions in their wallpaper lines. However, at that time reproductions frequently were more closely affiliated with the colonial revival style than with the colonial period. Manufacturers did not always follow the scale and colors of an original paper, and, as Richard C. Nylander has written, some manufacturers even purloined motifs from antique tapestries, which never happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Like so many historic houses, the Winslow House is a restoration that is not frozen in one particular period, but represents ownership between about 1699 and 1819, during which there were a number of modifications and additions made. During the earliest years the rooms would not have been wallpapered. Indeed, the squiggle-painted decoration in the original kitchen is representative of interior decoration in its earliest incarnation in America. The parlor (p. 317, p1. X) and room above the hail, or hail chamber (p.318, P1. XI), are restored to the Federal period. By the early nineteenth century wallpaper had become a popular way to embellish interiors, and by this time a wide variety of them were being imported from France and England as well as being made in large cities in the United States.

The reproduction wallpaper in the hall chamber of the Winslow House was provided by the firm Waterhouse Wallhangings of Chelsea, Massachusetts. The firm owes its success to the pioneer collector Dorothy Waterhouse, who searched New England for early wallpapers beginning in the 1930s. She not only looked at what was on the walls of old houses, she also searched attics for unused rolls and collected boxes that were embellished with wallpaper and trunks that were lined with it. She amassed quite a large collection of papers, which served as documents for the reproduction wallpaper business she founded in 1965. The company re-creates or adapts patterns that were in use in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.

Waterhouse Wallhangings is open to the trade only and is represented in design centers throughout the United States. To learn where these are located, readers should contact the headquarters in Chelsea, Massachusetts, by telephone at 617-884-8222 or by fax at 617-884-0345.