Installing Anaglypta in the foyer
I’ve wanted to use a textured wall covering on my stairs ever since seeing it (in person) in another house in the neighborhood a few years ago. It’s not uncommon to see this photos of Victorian houses, but something about seeing the texture in person—and realizing how long it had been there—really stuck with me. Textured wallpaper is just one entry on the long list of “authentically Victorian interior design elements that seem trashy at first to moderns but can actually look fantastic when correctly executed”. The foyer will have a low dado (or wainscot, if you prefer) about 29″ high all around the room, with textured wallpaper applied to that section. Where the stairs go up, the dado rail and textured wallpaper will follow the line of the handrail—up to the platform, then up the second longer run of stairs all the way to the small hallway at the top of the stairs.
For those uninitiated, there are two UK-based companies producing textured wall coverings whose founding dates back to the Victorian era. Both companies are still in business and still producing many patterns designed over a hundred years ago. Lincrusta, is the gold standard, because their products are made from pure linoleum, but the materials themselves are exorbitantly expensive, difficult to source, and complex to install correctly. Lincrusta is almost certainly what I saw in that link above, but I can’t let myself contemplate it for a new installation. So I’m going with an equally pedigreed second-place option, Anaglypta, whose products are made either from paper, PVC, or a combination of the two.
I’d already installed Anaglypta in my dining room (I will get around to posting about that some day), but in that room, I chose a patterns with smaller scales that were easier to match and hang. For the stairs, I wanted a more dramatic pattern with a larger scale. I settled on the puzzlingly named Early Victorian (it was first produced in 1897).
I got three rolls of “Early Victorian” in the mail on Friday (pro tip: order from UK-based sellers on eBay) and eagerly started planning out my installation on Saturday. It’s harder than it may sound, because I wanted to align the pattern at an attractive place for the horizontal runs (in the main part of the room and also on the platform), then maintain a consistent pattern from there going up the stairs. It’s difficult to get clean seams, all the more so when you’re working up stairs with pieces cut at a 41° slope and trying to keep things plumb, but I’ve learned that paint blunts fine details in the paper—and also marginally overlapping seams.
Right now everything looks pretty sloppy (I know I sound like a broken record) because the unpainted paper discolors and attracts grime like crazy. I also haven’t installed base cap or dado rail moldings, so there are a lot of junky looking raw edges. But it’s a start, and it looks a whole lot better than it did before. Onward!