When Was Wallpaper Invented?

The Origins of Wallpaper and Early Wallcoverings

Wall covering actually predates paper. Tapestries hung in medieval European castles, doing exactly the job paper would take over later: warmth, a bit of hush, and something good to look at. The move to paper-based wallcoverings then ran along two separate tracks.

China got there first. Paper was invented there around 105 CE. Rice paper, though, was being painted, dyed, and pasted onto interior walls even earlier, from at least the 200s BCE, the era of the Qin dynasty. Those Chinese hand-painted wallcoverings then traveled west along trade routes for centuries before any similar wallpaper appeared in Europe.

Europe's version arrived in the late 1400s. As the Victoria and Albert Museum's "A brief history of wallpaper" notes, those first papers mostly lined cupboards, small rooms, and merchant houses. They weren't yet the grand statement they'd become.

The First Documented European Wallpaper: 1509

The oldest surviving European piece dates to 1509 in York, England, and is tied to a printer named Hugo Goes. The design was an Italian-style pomegranate motif, woodblock-printed on a single sheet, and it turned up pasted to the beams of Christ's College, Cambridge, on the back of a London proclamation. As physical artifacts go, it's the oldest we've got.

There's an earlier story, though. Back in 1481 a French painter, Jean Bourdichon, was paid to paint 50 rolls of paper with angels on a blue ground for King Louis XI. That work came 28 years before Hugo Goes, but not a scrap of it survives.

Both tell you the same thing about the early economics. Paper was dear, hand decoration was painstaking, and the result was a luxury reserved for royals, the church, and wealthy merchants.

How Wallpaper Was Made: Early Printing Techniques

Early designs borrowed shamelessly from costlier textile wallcoverings: hand-loomed tapestry, brocade, and damask. The first wallpaper patterns were block-printed by hand onto small sheets of rag paper. Then they were hung edge to edge across plaster with a simple flour paste. Surface printing came later. It applies the design with raised metal or wood blocks that roll across a moving web of paper. That mechanical press let makers churn out continuous patterns at speeds no hand printer could touch, and it built the modern wallpaper industry around repeating, machine-printed wallcoverings.

Between roughly 1500 and 1800, three printing techniques carried the trade. The first was hand painting: single sheets done in watercolor or tempera, used through the 16th century for the very top end, Bourdichon's 1481 commission included. The second was woodblock printing, where a block carved in relief is inked and pressed onto each sheet by hand. The 1509 Hugo Goes design used this, and because every color needed its own block lined up just so, a single roll might take 8 to 30 separate impressions. The third was stenciling, a quicker stand-in for woodblock on simpler patterns, cut from leather, oiled paper, or thin metal and often finished off by hand.

All three were slow going. A single craftsman might manage a dozen rolls in a week, which is exactly why the product stayed a luxury straight through the 1500s and 1600s.

17th Century: Chinese Wallpaper Arrives in Europe

By the 1600s, hand-painted Chinese papers were arriving in Europe along East India Company trade routes. The Victoria and Albert Museum wallpaper collection records that the "introduction of Chinese wallpapers in the 17th century sparked a fashion that lasted a century." These became status symbols across the European market and among royalty especially. The designs were all birds and flowering trees and sweeping city views, hand-painted on long sheets and joined so a single scene wrapped an entire room. As the museum puts it, "Fragile, ephemeral, and easy to replace, wallpaper has often disappeared from the historical record." That is why the surviving 17th-century examples now rank among the most prized objects in design collections.

Wallpaper in the 18th Century: French Dominance and Panoramic Scenes

The 1700s belonged to the French, and two ideas from that century still echo through design today.

The first was the panoramic scene: hand-painted landscape murals of classical or far-off places, built to wrap a whole room. One could take months and several skilled painters. Hanging it was how the French and English elite showed off. The second was toile de Jouy, born at the Oberkampf factory in Jouy-en-Josas in 1760. Toile is a single-color picture pattern of pastoral or classical scenes, and it turned into one of the longest-lived motifs in the whole history of the craft, still in steady use three centuries on.

Hanging any of this remained luxury work. The wealthy papered their walls. Everyone else painted, whitewashed, or hung fabric.

The Industrial Revolution: Mass Production and the Modern Wallpaper Industry

The real turning point came in 1839, when an English engineer named Charles Harold Potter patented a steam-powered roller printing machine. Roller printing pushed woodblock aside for everything but the priciest work, and with it the modern wallpaper industry was born.

The math changed overnight. A hand-blocked design that ate up a craftsman's week could now be machine-printed in hours. Single joined sheets gave way to one continuous roll of 30 feet or more. Cost fell by some 90 percent in a single generation. By 1850 it was a middle-class choice, not an elite one. By 1900, even working-class homes often had it in the parlor.

That same mid-century stretch produced the era's most enduring designs. The wallpaper designer William Morris and the broader Arts and Crafts movement pushed back against the cheap roller-printed stuff. From 1862 on, Morris revived hand block-printing on premium paper, with dense botanical motifs drawn from English gardens and medieval manuscripts. Those hand processes were costly. But the patterns endured. Many designed between the 1860s and 1890s are still printed today, more than 150 years on. It's a rare thing, wallpaper that outlives its own century.

What Did 1920s Wallpaper Look Like?

The 1920s brought Art Deco geometry and bold contrast. The motifs you'd have seen included Deco shapes like chevrons, sunbursts, and fans; stylized florals shaped by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School; Egyptian Revival designs that swept in after King Tut's tomb was opened in 1922; metallic gold, silver, and bronze inks sold widely for the first time; and single-pattern repeats in high-contrast color.

The decade's bigger gift, though, was pre-pasted paper. Before it, hangers had to mix wheat or animal-based paste on site. Now the glue came applied at the factory and all the homeowner added was water. It was a clear signal of what wallpaper could become: faster, cheaper, and more accessible than ever.

What Did 1950s Wallpaper Look Like?

The post-war boom pushed the craft to its 20th-century peak, and the 1950s left behind two ideas that still matter. The first was vinyl coating. A thin layer over the print made wallpaper washable, scrubbable, and far tougher than paper alone. That finally opened the door to kitchens and baths, where humidity had always ruled paper out.

The second was sheer mass-market reach. Pattern catalogs ballooned, and the styles ran from atomic and starburst motifs to boomerangs and abstract geometrics, from cherries and kitchen themes (the kitchen was newly a showpiece) to pastel pinks, mint greens, and powder blues, with cowboy and western scenes for boys' rooms and dense, busy florals everywhere else. It went up at a scale the trade had never seen, in nearly every room of the typical suburban house. No decade reached further.

Why Did People Use Wallpaper Instead of Paint?

For most of the story, paint and paper simply did different jobs.

First, wallpaper hid a wall's sins. Pre-war walls were lath and plaster, prone to hairline cracks, settling, and uneven texture. Paint showed every bit of that. Wallpaper covered the lot. Second, it was for a long time the only real way to get color and pattern at all. Modern paint colors and finishes didn't exist until the mid-20th century. Before that, paint meant white, off-white, or a few muddy pigments, while a pattern book offered hundreds of motifs. Third, those paper layers soaked up sound and added a thin buffer against cold outside walls. It was the same comfort logic that had once put tapestries on castle walls. And finally, it carried status. From the 1500s through the 1800s, wallpaper was either a luxury good or a hard-won middle-class marker.

The swing to paint started in the 1960s, when three things lined up at once. Drywall replaced lath and plaster and gave paint a smooth surface to sit on. Modern chemistry blew open the range of colors and finishes. And central heating retired the insulation argument entirely. Paint became the default, and pattern became the choice you made for special rooms.

The 1980s Decline and the 2010s Revival

The craft peaked around 1970 and then slid for a long while. The 1980s gave us the country-craft, mauve-and-burgundy, oversized-floral looks that became shorthand for "dated" by the late 1990s, and removal services boomed as people stripped layer after layer off their walls. By the 2000s the category had nearly vanished. Magazines dropped it, new builds skipped it, and it came to feel like something you only saw at your grandparents' place.

The comeback started around 2015. Peel-and-stick made hanging it easy for renters and beginners, social media rewarded visual depth, and the all-white minimalism of the 2010s finally wore thin. By 2020 it was back in the major design magazines, and by 2026 it's a mainstream choice once more. For where things stand now, see our piece on Is Wallpaper Back in Style?.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was wallpaper first used in homes?

Decorated paper lined Chinese homes from at least the 200s BCE, and reached European homes in the late 1400s. The oldest surviving European example dates to 1509 in England.

Where was wallpaper invented?

In two places, independently. China got there around the 200s BCE using rice paper, and Europe followed in the late 15th century, with Italy and France leading the early work. England produced the oldest surviving examples.

How was wallpaper originally made?

By hand, either hand-painted onto single sheets in watercolor or woodblock-printed from carved blocks pressed onto paper. A multi-color design might need 8 to 30 separate block impressions per roll. Roller printing didn't take over until 1839.

What changed wallpaper design in the 19th century?

Two opposing forces. Roller printing made it cheap and mass-market from 1839 on, while the Arts and Crafts movement pushed back with hand block-printed botanical designs on premium paper. Several of those 19th-century patterns are still in production today.

What did wallpaper look like in the 1920s?

It leaned into Art Deco geometry, stylized florals, Egyptian Revival motifs (after Tut's tomb in 1922), and metallic gold, silver, and bronze inks. The decade also introduced pre-pasted paper, which made hanging it far easier.

What did 1950s wallpaper look like?

Atomic and starburst motifs, boomerangs, kitchen themes like cherries and fruit, pastel pinks, mints, and powder blues, and cowboy scenes for kids' rooms. The 1950s also brought vinyl coating, which made paper washable for the first time.

Why did people use wallpaper instead of paint?

It hid wall flaws that paint exposed, delivered color and pattern that paint couldn't until modern chemistry arrived, buffered sound and cold in homes without central heat, and signaled status for much of its history. Paint only became the default once drywall, modern paint, and central heating made those advantages matter less.

Our Take

Outside of paint itself, no home finish has a longer continuous run than this one. Five centuries in Europe, two thousand years in China, through every major shift in money and technology the world has thrown up since. The printing techniques and the motifs turn over every generation. The pull toward putting depth and pattern on a wall hasn't budged.

If the history leaves you wondering which patterns have aged best, the most trend-proof ones tend to be the oldest: toile, grasscloth, classic stripes, and botanical illustration are all still in steady use. Our piece on Is Wallpaper Back in Style? covers what's in and what's out, and for the wider category, see our Types of Wallpaper.

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Last updated: May 2026.