Elinor Merrill was the pre-eminent New York dealer of antique European textiles and wallcoverings. A specialist in French textiles, Merrill served as a consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to the Art Institute of Chicago. She also assisted in the development of the collections of the Cooper Hewitt and the Winterthur museums. After...

This drapery pattern called Broadway is part of the first collection of wallcoverings designed by Boym Partners for Wolf-Gordon. The collection was inspired by the Boym’s travels and this trompe l’oeil pattern of drapery folds was inspired by the curtains in Broadway theaters. The design creates a strong vertical pattern and is rendered in a...

This screen-printed sidewall is meant to look like cement that has been impressed with a woodgrain pattern, because why not? The vertically-aligned board “impressions” are printed in light and dark grey with a granular texture that effectively imitates the rough surface of cement. The artists responsible for this industrially-inspired wallpaper are German furniture designers Klaus-Achim...

Though understated in character, this faux-marble sidewall required an impressive amount of attention to detail on behalf of the manufacturers. The larger background patterns are block-printed in subtle tones of light grey, blue and pink, and the top layer of whitish veins is painstakingly hand painted. Kept for reference in the archives of American wallpaper...

Woodgrain or faux bois designs are another genre with a long running history in wallpaper design. There are examples in the collection that were hand painted, wood block printed, machine printed and lithograph printed. There are most likely digital versions as well but I don’t believe there is an example in the Cooper Hewitt collection,...

This is the first panel from the set of ten wallpapers showing a realistic rendering of a 4×8 foot sheet of drywall, all prepped and awaiting its final surface coating. To achieve this high degree of realism, Fischer entered an actual construction site and painstakingly photographed ten different drywall panels. The exacting photography and follow-up...