TRADITIONAL WALL & CEILING DECORATING
It is hard to believe that the standard today, in houses old and new, is plain, unbroken drywall, painted linen white. Once you’ve discovered the decorated wall, you may not be able to live in a white box again.
Traditional wall & ceiling decorating listings pull together many decorative elements and effects: paints, wall panels and wood ornaments, decorative plaster, wallpaper, tin ceilings. To get a feel for the products and how they compare, many people prefer to start in one of the subcategories:
Paints & Finishes: historical colors; period stencils;, faux-finish materials; milk paint
Paneling and Wainscot: paneled walls; interior architectural elements; wainscot; wood mouldings
Wood Ornament & Moulding: interior columns and capitals; picture rail and chair mouldings; sawn embellishments
Plaster Ornament/Moulding: capitals; composition ornament; cornice moulding; ceiling medallions; fine plaster
Ornamental Ceilings: metal ceilings; plaster ornament; designed ceiling paper suites; paint decorators
Wallcoverings and Wallpaper: hand-blocked, silk-screened, or machine-made reproduction and period-inspired papers for walls, friezes, borders, etc.; embossed coverings
Proceed with caution! Once you have discovered the decorated wall—paint techniques and printed papers, embossed surfaces, ornamental plaster, carved wood, wall tiles--you may not be able to live in a white box again. White walls will feel like the absence of finish (—or they will remind you of whitewash, and therefore the outhouse or stable!). History offers options to those who choose to break out of the (white) box.
Your first surprise may be the clear, bright colors in Georgian and Federal buildings. Forget the murky “colonial” palette of the 1950s–1970s. Turns out they replicated paint samples embedded with dirt and altered by time. The true colors of the period are not greyed down, but rather include brilliant yellow, Prussian blue and turquoise, clear green, blood red, plus black and rich ivories tinted with grey, yellow, or pink. Fancier homes had patterned paper borders running around cornice or trim. Strong interior color continued through the Greek Revival or Empire period, as did wallpaper and specialty finishes—such as entry halls painted in imitation of ashlar blocks.
The Victorian period was the modern heyday of wall and ceiling ornamentation. By the 1870s the tripartite treatment was fashionable: walls divided into dado (or wainscot) below the chair rail, a fill or field section, and a frieze at the top of the wall. Painted, frescoed, and papered ceilings were all the rage during late 1870s through the 1890s. Ceilings might have multiple borders, corner blocks, decoupage, and freehand painting. Machine-embossed Anaglypta and Lincrusta wallcoverings, installed unfinished, were treated to decorating effects that imitated tooled leather, pressed metal, wood carving, or plasterwork. Three-dimensional ornament included raised-panel wainscots, figural fireplace tiles, and highly embellished plaster ceiling medallions.
The Arts and Crafts period is often described as plain, ascetic, a reaction against Victorian excess—but, at least by modern standards, their interiors were still highly decorated. In living and dining rooms, a frieze with a depth of 18 to 27 inches or more finished the wall over a high wainscot, from baseboard to plate rail, of wood or burlap panels divided by battens. Spaces between ceiling beams were often decorated with painted burlap, glazing or gilding, or texture treatments. Colors were indeed earthier yet included gold, grass green, and eggplant, with pastels in the bedrooms.
Colonial Revival rooms featured off-whites such as ivory, bone, soft grey, and buttercream. Large-patterned classical papers and florals were stylish; hand-painted murals and scenic papers came back into fashion. Textured surfaces and warm colors were often used in Period Revival houses of the 1920s through 1940.
Take your time; wallpaper alone offers you an endless field of options.
Need help homing in on your house? See our Style Guide (coming soon) for an introduction.
