Create wall poetry with wallpaper

"Wallpaper has never been as good as it is today," Sweden's Orjan Sandberg, involved in wall coverings since 1976 and managing director of the Sandberg company, said at the world's top home show, Maison & Objet.

Paper is not the only winner of the world's walls, with fabrics and plastics also signing on to the trend towards wall-coverings rather than paint in homes, hotels or shopping malls, according to experts attending the Paris show.

With the fashion for the bare white-washed identikit minimalism of the 1980s and 1990s now dead and gone, the taste for strong individual statements in interior design has favoured the wall's return.

"The revival of ornament has been a significant factor in the re-emergence of wallpaper," said design writer Lachlan Blackley in the UK-published book Wallpaper.

"A millennium-induced urge for complex decor," he added, "has enabled decoration in its many forms to boldly re-enter visual culture."

Off the wall...
And technological advances in digital imagery, large-format printing and textile and paper-making have led to the production of popular, fast-selling adhesive vinyls, stickers and fabric coverings, as well as hi-tech easy-to-stick decorative wallpapers.

Take New York's Bart Halpern, who bought up an old Brooklyn fabric-pleating firm in the 1990s and now sells his micro-fibre marvels to embellish the walls of Giorgio Armani boutiques worldwide as well as the Wynn Las Vegas casino resort. Or Senegal's CaraColo, which is manufacturing magnetic PVC wall-hangings that can be decorated with pop-on metal cut-outs.

Sweden's Sandberg says that after contracting designers to dream up new eye-catching papers, sales spiralled in Scandinavia two years ago and are now on the increase in Germany, France and Russia.

At the forefront of the designer wallpaper revolution were companies such as Germany's Marburg, who notably used top-edge designers such as Karim Rashid and Ulf Moritz, or Britain's Graham & Brown, who took on fashion guru Julien Macdonald.

Inspired by the 60s, when Andy Warhol became the first artist to connect art and domestic products with his 1966 "Cow" wallpaper, Britain's Cole & Son, an 1875-founded company, got art students to produce a new retro collection "that was eaten alive, that caused a shockwave in the industry," said Sales Director Tim Burles.

"We'd been through this long period of minimalism of neutral colours and suddenly there was this splash of colour. Now everyone's doing paper," said Burles, whose company quadrupled turnover in four years and sells to 52 nations.

The wallpaper revival, the experts say however, is as much about technological progress as it is about design.

Easy as 1... 2... 3...
Once difficult to stick, many of today's wallpapers come with a new man-made fibre backing, called "non-woven", that eliminates the need for a special wallpaper table. Instead the paste is rolled directly onto the wall and the paper stuck in one simple go.

It comes off with one pull, is generally spongeable and easy to clean, and is not necessarily more expensive than paint.

As a result, specialists such as France's Elitis offer metallic vinyls, papers tinted in mother-of-pearl, vinyls in basketweave or in 3D layers with velvet and lace. And pearls and stick-on jewellery feature on papers by Germany's Marburg.

But the use of papers as decor has changed, with more people buying but in smaller quantities, often for a single "feature" wall or panel.

"Wallpaper used to be for family or holiday homes," said Carole Texier, who runs Paris' most well-known paper shop. "It would recount the history of a home, its memories, who slept in what room and when."

"Nowadays people rarely do an entire room in wallpaper," she said. "They use it as a statement. Paint offers colour, wallpaper brings personality. It's the poetry of walls."