1838 wallcoverings

1838 Wallcoverings wallpaper comes out of the British garden tradition, which on a wall means full florals, botanical plates and damask repeats rather than quiet texture. Pattern scale is the thing to settle first. A large floral that looks overwhelming on a sample card usually calms down once it covers a whole wall, and a fine botanical does the reverse: from across the room it stops reading as a motif and starts reading as texture.

Rooms in an American home that suit 1838 Wallcoverings wallpaper

A powder room carries the boldest pattern in the house, because you take the wall in whole from the doorway instead of in fragments. An entryway is the tighter case: against a standard 8 ft (2.44 m) ceiling a lighter botanical keeps the hall from closing in, and it holds up next to a coat rail and full afternoon sun from the front door. Above a headboard in the primary bedroom, one paper does the work of a bed frame. A breakfast nook is the quietly good spot for these designs, since the pattern sits behind the table at the height you actually look at it.

Choosing a collection: Camellia, Rosemore and Avington

The range runs to 93 papers, so the collections are the practical way in rather than the full grid. Camellia and Rosemore each hold eight designs and Avington seven, small enough to compare every colorway in one sitting. Open one, narrow it to two, then get samples on the wall and look at them at night as well as at noon.

Floral, damask and V&A archive patterns

The drawing splits roughly three ways. Botanical illustration is the closest to a printed plate, and our wider botanical wallpaper range shows what else sits in that register. Damask is the formal end of the collection, a repeat that reads as structure once it is up, and it is worth seeing against the broader damask wallpaper selection before you settle. The third strand comes from the Victoria and Albert Museum: in V&A Decorative Papers II the brand reworks ornament out of the museum archives, from source designs that go back to the eighteenth century.

What surface printing does to an 1838 Wallcoverings print

Part of the range still runs on surface-print machines built more than a century ago, and only a handful of those are left anywhere in the world. What they give is a hand-painted effect: the motif is interpreted instead of copied line for line, so on plain drywall in low evening light the pattern has a softness at its edges that a flat digital print does not. Those machines stand in the company's own factory in Lancashire, in the north of England, where the brother-and-sister team James and Abigail Watson runs the business, backed by a family that has printed wallpaper for more than four generations. The name is a date: in 1838, a short distance from where that factory stands, wallpaper was first printed by machine instead of by hand.

Hanging the rolls and ordering from the Netherlands

Every roll carries a responsibly sourced non-woven backing, so it hangs the way any non-woven wallpaper does: paste onto the wall, the length goes up dry, no soaking time. The inks are water-based, with no volatile organic compounds in them, which is worth knowing for a nursery or a bathroom that airs out slowly. European rolls are cut to different widths and lengths than the American standard, so work from the dimensions on the product page and not from a US rule of thumb. We are an official dealer, so every order of 1838 Wallcoverings wallpaper ships from the Netherlands with duties and taxes already included in the price shown.