Choosing wallpaper in 2023 is less about chasing trends and more about falling in love.
Interior design is like fashion in that sense, say Jo Gray and Relda Frogley of Auckland mural wallpaper company Back to the Wall. “Think of that beautiful shirt you bought 20 years ago that’s still in your wardrobe and you still love it,” Jo says. “Now, more than ever, we are all wanting to create home interiors that say with confidence, this my personality, this is what I love.”
Twenty years ago, few of us were putting up wallpaper in our homes. But the unpopularity of wallpaper around that time was also its liberation. No longer straitjacketed by the need to serve a primarily practical purpose – cover the walls of an entire home, paper over the cracks or add insulation – it was freed to be reinvented into a bolder, individualised form. An art form, even.
When wallpaper returned to vogue a decade or more ago, it was not as the serviceable wall covering
