By Martha Mulholland

One of my secret passions (for the secret senior citizen inside of me) is visiting historic house museums. There is almost nothing I love more than tromping through a dusty, crooked, dismally decorated Georgian mansion with a bunch of grannies taking photos of stuff dead people used to own and asking the hapless docents questions about the mortar ratio in the brickwork and type of hardwood used in the parquet. And while many of my pre-AARP contemporaries might find spending a Saturday touring Rutherford B. Hayes's boyhood home akin to a fry in the seventh circle of Hell, not so fast. While many of these houses sport the typically yawn-inducing “period appropriate” décor and color palette of beige, off-beige, and occasionally BONE, this is often the sad result of a contemporary misconception. 

Though it's true that our forefathers had a major jones for uncomfortable wooden chairs, portraits of mean-looking women, and tall, tiny beds, they also had the color sensibility of a South Florida drag queen. Often when historic homes are taken over by trusts and subsequently restored, the interiors have faded, flaked or been painted over in countless times, so we assume that the original colors were subdued shades of grey and gold—popular neutrals in the modern day interior palette. Upon further investigation, however, paint sampling often reveals that the great rooms of these houses had wainscoting, chair rails and ceiling modillions painted in shades of pink, blue, green, orange, and yellow—sometimes all in one room. The dining room at Mount Vernon is jade green—Monticello’s is canary yellow. But it's the wallpaper, buried deep beneath centuries of bad decorating decisions, that really lets the cat out of the bag. 

Oh, the wallpaper! The late 18th and early 19th centuries produced some wall coverings that would make Timothy Leary and Tony Duquette step down and bow. I’m talking ombre acanthus leaves, dizzying lime green cabbage roses, magic eye inducing geometries, and ultraviolet swirling pagodas—not for the faint of heart. Sadly, most of these papers have long been covered up, sun faded, water damaged, or reduced to tatters. But thanks to the brilliant work of the folks at Adelphi Paper Hangings, many of the remnants of these historic papers have been salvaged, restored to their former glory, and reintroduced to the modern market. They are without question the most beautiful, imaginative, and colorful papers I've ever seen, and it’s impossible to imagine that many are more than two hundred years old. 

Adelphi’s website features papers from 1750 to 1930 in a variety of historic color ways. Each one is accompanied by a description of where it was originally made, and the home it was salvaged from. It's my dream to one day be wealthy enough (they don’t come cheap) to paper a powder room in one of Adelphi’s fabulous creations, satisfying both the preservationist and the pattern lover in me. But until then, I can visit house museums to my heart's content, hoping to stumble across some trace of the former flamboyance that lies buried beneath all that beige.

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