I get asked about wallpaper more than almost anything else, and always as a practical question: should I put it up, will it hurt my resale, how bad is it to take down. I will answer all three at the bottom. But I went looking for the history first, and it turns out wallpaper has one of the strangest stories of any building material in your house — including a factory that helped launch one of the first hot-air balloons and was burned down by a mob six years later, and a public-health book that had to be digitised by people in protective suits.
Search “who invented wallpaper” and you will be told the Chinese glued rice paper to their walls in 200 BC. I could not find that claim in a single authoritative source — not the Victoria and Albert Museum, not Cooper Hewitt, not the Met, not the Wallpaper History Society. It appears almost exclusively on decorating blogs citing each other. “Rice paper” is itself a misnomer; it is not made from rice.
Here is the version that is actually documented, and it is a better line anyway: paper is Chinese. Wallpaper is European. Papermaking was reported to the Chinese imperial court around AD 105, with archaeological fragments from Dunhuang possibly two centuries older. It reached Baghdad in the 8th century and Europe by the 12th, and the V&A dates wallpaper’s emergence as a European product to the 16th century, once paper itself was cheap enough to waste on a wall.
You will also be told Jean-Michel Papillon invented wallpaper, or invented the repeating pattern that matches at the seams, around 1688. I could not confirm that in any authoritative source either. Papillon was a real and accomplished French wood-engraver who wrote the definitive 18th-century treatise on woodblock engraving. Somewhere along the way the internet promoted him.
In 1911, workmen in the Master’s Lodge at Christ’s College, Cambridge found fragments of black-and-white woodblock-printed paper with a pomegranate motif, laid over the original ceiling beams. The printer’s mark — the letter H plus a goose — identifies Hugh Goes, a printer working in York, on a visual pun on his own name.
The remarkable part is how it is dated. Goes printed his wallpaper on waste sheets, and the back of the paper carries a papal indulgence, a poem on the death of Henry VII, and a proclamation announcing the accession of Henry VIII in 1509. So the paper cannot predate 1509. The oldest known printed wallpaper in Britain is datable only because a Tudor printer was too thrifty to buy clean stock.
Two corrections to what you will read elsewhere: the College and the V&A both call it the oldest known example in Britain, not in Europe. And the V&A object usually illustrated is a later reconstruction, not the original fragment.
This is the throughline. The V&A describes early wallpaper as decorating cupboards and small rooms in merchants’ houses, not aristocratic ones. It was the aspirational substitute from the beginning.
Hand-painted Chinese wall papers went on sale in London in the late 17th century and dominated the luxury market for over a hundred years. They came through the East India Company, were painted in Canton and Macao, and were sold in sets of 25 or 40 sheets forming a continuous, non-repeating mural. A custom order could take eighteen months.
And here is the thing: the Chinese did not use these papers on their own walls. They preferred plain white, crimson or gold. Painted papers were used for window coverings in the trading ports. The entire genre was an export product invented for European taste — which is why European imitators produced knock-offs covered in dragons and camels, motifs that never appear in the authentic papers.
Historic New England holds Chinese hand-painted papers from the 1780s originally ordered by the Philadelphia banker Robert Morris.
From 1712, under Queen Anne, patterned, printed or painted paper carried an excise duty. Plain paper did not.
| Year | Rate |
|---|---|
| 1712, at introduction | 1 penny per yard |
| 1714 | 1½ pence |
| 1777 | 1¾ pence |
Payment was proved by a government excise stamp on the back of each sheet, applied at the manufactory before the sheets were joined. Which produced two very good consequences.
First, a workaround. Buy untaxed plain paper, hang it, and stencil the pattern on the wall yourself. Thriftier households would size the plain paper, lay a ground colour, and then stencil or block it in place — doing at home exactly what the taxed manufacturer did in the factory.
Second, and stranger: the Excise reportedly prohibited paper-stainers from using continuous rolls, because stamping sheet by sheet was how the revenue got collected. If that is right — and I have it from one well-researched history source rather than an archive, so treat it as reported — then a tax held back the technology for roughly thirty years after the machinery to make rolls existed.
The wallpaper tax was repealed in the 1830s; sources give 1830 and 1836. Do not confuse it with the general duty on all paper, which survived until 1861.
This is my favourite story in the whole subject.
Jean-Baptiste Réveillon (1725–1811) entered the wallpaper trade in 1753 selling imported English flock papers, then manufacturing his own. He moved to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris, bought a mansion called La Folie Titon in 1765 and put the factory on the ground floor with his residence above. He developed a new vellum paper process in 1782 and was granted the right to style himself a Manufacture Royale in 1783. Marie Antoinette used his blue papers. The Met calls him “the greatest wallpaper manufacturer of the pre-revolutionary period in France.”
His paper business brought him into contact with Étienne de Montgolfier, and in September 1783 a Montgolfier balloon — the Aérostat Réveillon — went up from Réveillon’s garden at La Folie Titon, its envelope decorated by him.
Sources split on the details, and since I am asking you to trust the rest of this article I will say so. Réveillon’s own biography gives 12 September and describes the envelope as covered with his wallpaper; accounts of the Montgolfier brothers date the Folie Titon test to 11 September and describe the envelope as taffeta coated with alum and decorated by Réveillon. Everyone agrees it was his garden and his hand on the decoration.
Five and a half years later, on 28 April 1789 — two weeks before the Estates-General convened and eleven weeks before the Bastille fell — a crowd of more than 6,000, over two days, scaled the walls of that same house, broke the doors, and destroyed the furnishings, the designs and the bonds. Réveillon and his family escaped over the garden wall. The Gardes Françaises fired on the crowd.
And the cause was a rumour. Réveillon was not a sweatshop owner who cut wages; he was reputedly known for benevolence toward the poor, and employed around 300 people. In the context of arguing for deregulating bread prices, in a year of famine, he made a remark that was reported and repeated as a call to reduce wages. A saltpetre manufacturer had his premises destroyed the day before for something similar.
Casualty accounts range from about two dozen to several hundred; the official report counted 71 killed, wounded or detained. It was the bloodiest disturbance in Paris before the Revolution proper. Réveillon fled to England with his fortune intact.
Two inventions did it.
Continuous paper. You cannot machine-print a roll of wallpaper until you can make a roll of paper. Nicolas-Louis Robert conceived a machine forming paper as a continuous sheet on an endless wire cloth in 1798 and was granted the patent on 18 January 1799. He sold the rights, was never paid, and died poor. The design travelled to England, where Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier hired the engineer Bryan Donkin, who built an improved machine in 1807. The Fourdriniers lost money on it through errors in their patents. Donkin went on to build 191 machines, and every paper machine of that type is still called a “Fourdrinier.”
The printing machine. Harold Potter of Darwen, Lancashire took out a patent in 1839 adapting a calico printing technique to wallpaper — the V&A credits the Lancashire cotton firm Potters & Ross with the same breakthrough in the same year. The mature version of that machine carries up to twelve ink rollers arranged around a central drum like a Ferris wheel, laying down every colour in one pass with no drying between — which is why surface prints have soft, slightly imprecise edges. Surface printing is the oldest automated printing method still in use today.
| Year | UK wallpaper output |
|---|---|
| 1834 | around 1 million rolls |
| 1860 | nearly 9 million |
| c. 1900 | 50 million |
| 1939 | nearly 100 million |
Ninefold in a generation, fiftyfold in two. And prices fell “dramatically to as little as 0.25 pence per yard” — a farthing. Which means that by the mid-Victorian period, a yard of wallpaper cost less than the tax on a yard had cost a century earlier.
Now the part everyone half-remembers. It is real, it is worse in some ways than the popular version and much less lurid in others, and the honest telling is better than the myth.
Scheele’s green, a copper arsenite, was invented by the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1775. Emerald green — also called Paris green or Schweinfurt green — a more stable and more brilliant copper acetoarsenite, followed in 1814.
Why did wallpaper use them? Because before these pigments, a bright, stable, saturated green was essentially unavailable at any price. Existing greens were dull, fugitive, or both. These were cheap, intensely brilliant, and did not fade — exactly what a mass-market printed product needs. They went into wallpaper, paint, fabric dye, artificial flowers, children’s toys, confectionery and candle wax.
And it was not only green. RISD’s testing found arsenic in the blue and pink areas of a floral wallpaper and in the dyed wool of the flocking; the UK National Archives found it in cream, yellow and brown. Arsenical compounds were used as a base and a filler, not just as the green colourant. So “if it isn’t green it’s safe” is wrong.
In 1857, Dr William Hinds, a Birmingham physician, reported that he suffered abdominal cramps and light-headedness in his green-papered study, and that his patients had sore throats, weakness and inflamed eyes that cleared up when they went to the seaside. He warned there was “a great deal of slow poisoning” going on in Britain.
In 1862, in Limehouse in east London, four young siblings of the Turner family died after sharing a bedroom papered in Scheele’s green. The fourth child, aged three, died after tearing off and chewing strips of the paper. Dr Thomas Orton investigated, ruling out water and sanitation before settling on the wallpaper.
The jury returned a verdict of death from natural causes anyway, despite the toxicologist’s evidence. That detail is the one worth carrying away.
Other reported cases: the London surgeon Robert Brudenell Carter believed two of his own children died from arsenical paper in their nursery. A child in Peckham died after sucking wallpaper. In 1879, a visiting dignitary fell ill after a night in an arsenically decorated bedroom at Buckingham Palace, which prompted the removal of the papers — usually told as “Queen Victoria had all the green wallpaper stripped,” and worth attributing rather than asserting.
Here is what separates this from every other wallpaper article you will read.
The mechanism the Victorians settled on was that mould growing on arsenical wallpaper paste volatilised the arsenic into a gas. The Italian physician Bartolomeo Gosio demonstrated something like it in the early 1890s, and the gas was identified as trimethylarsine in the 1930s.
In 2005, Cullen and Bentley published “The toxicity of trimethylarsine: an urban myth” in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring, arguing the gas is far less toxic than assumed and that wallpaper could not have produced it in quantities sufficient to cause the reported deaths. The NIH’s historical review summarises the state of play: there were likely insufficient quantities of gas to cause the reported effects, and possibly the mould itself was the responsible agent.
Arsenical wallpaper really did poison people. But the specific mechanism the Victorians settled on — poison gas rising off the walls — was probably wrong, and it took chemists until 2005 to say so in print. The children who died were the ones who ate the paper.
What survives scrutiny: direct ingestion, inhalation of dust from deteriorating paper, and skin contact. And note why the connection took decades to accept — doses lethal to children and the elderly were easily metabolised by healthy adults.
The designer whose wallpapers still hang in beautiful houses was, awkwardly, also an heir to an arsenic fortune.
Devon Great Consols was founded in 1844 when six investors, including William Morris Sr., leased ground from the Duke of Bedford. A rich copper lode was struck within months; shares bought at £1 returned over £200 each within six years. Around 1864 it was the most productive copper mine in the world. As copper declined, the company began refining arsenic in 1867 and became the largest arsenic producer in the world. Production continued to 1930.
Morris the designer served as a director of the company in the 1870s — sources differ on whether four, five or six years — and the family held roughly 30%. And his early wallpapers, including Trellis, contained arsenical colours.
Asked about the growing alarm, he wrote to the dyer Thomas Wardle in 1885:
“As to the arsenic scare a greater folly it is hardly possible to imagine: the doctors were bitten as people were bitten by the witch fever.”
The letter is in Norman Kelvin’s edition of Morris’s collected correspondence and is most often quoted via Lucinda Hawksley’s Bitten by Witch Fever, which takes its title from it.
He was wrong, and he switched anyway. Morris & Co. began producing arsenic-free wallpapers in the 1870s through the printer Jeffrey & Co., which launched an explicitly “arsenic free” line in 1879. He bowed to the market while telling his friends the market was hysterical.
Modern testing has been done, more than once. In 2003, Professor Andy Meharg of the University of Aberdeen ran portable X-ray fluorescence on early Morris papers and published in Nature, finding arsenic, lead, chromium and mercury. Meharg’s line: “William Morris was a utopian idealist whose life was full of contradictions.”
| Study | Sample | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Meharg, Nature, 2003 | Early William Morris papers | Arsenic, lead, chromium, mercury |
| UK National Archives | 279 samples registered 1879–1881 | ~58% likely contained arsenic |
| RISD Museum, 2020 | 9 papers, late 18th to mid-19th century | All nine positive |
| Historic England | Victorian fragments, Wrest Park collection | Copper-arsenic pigments in bright greens |
Historic England adds a caveat almost nobody mentions: X-ray fluorescence detects elements, not compounds, and lead produces similar readings to arsenic, causing false positives. So “tested positive by XRF” is strong evidence, not chemical proof of a specific pigment.
And this one is American, which makes it the best story for a Texas audience.
In 1874, Dr Robert Clark Kedzie, a chemist with the Michigan State Board of Health, published Shadows from the Walls of Death: Facts and Inferences Prefacing a Book of Specimens of Arsenical Wall Papers. It contains almost no text — a title page, a short preface, a note from the Board of Health, and then actual samples of arsenical wallpaper bound in as the pages.
He printed 100 copies and mailed them to public libraries across Michigan as a public-health warning. Nearly all were destroyed by the libraries, on the grounds that the book was a hazard to patrons.
Only a handful survive — sources differ on whether four or five — held by Harvard Medical School, the National Library of Medicine, Michigan State University and the University of Michigan, with pages individually sealed in plastic. The National Library of Medicine digitised its copy with staff in protective suits working inside a fume hood. The samples averaged roughly two grams of arsenic per square foot.
The theory is real and published, and it says less than people think. In 1982, David Jones and Kenneth Ledingham published “Arsenic in Napoleon’s wallpaper” in Nature, after a radio listener sent Jones an original scrap from Longwood House on St Helena. Their conclusion was that it contained enough arsenic to be capable of causing illness but probably not death.
That nuance did not survive contact with the public. The Fondation Napoléon’s own review says the wallpaper theory “cannot be ruled out altogether” but “was never established,” notes that arsenic in his hair has innocent explanations — arsenical hair powders were commonplace — and gives the most medically credible account as chronic hepatitis plus a perforating gastric ulcer degenerating into carcinoma, compounded by the antimony and mercury his doctors were dosing him with. Also worth saying: green wallpaper was on St Helena because green wallpaper was fashionable everywhere.
This is the ending people expect and it is not what happened. There was no British ban on arsenic in wallpaper. The shift was driven by public pressure, not regulation.
Consumers stopped buying it, and manufacturers discovered that “arsenic free” printed on the label sold more rolls than the prettiest green ever did.
| Type | What it is |
|---|---|
| Non-woven | Cellulose and textile fibres with binders, reinforced with acrylates. The key property: dimensionally stable when wet. |
| Solid vinyl (paper-backed vinyl) | A paper substrate laminated to a solid sheet of vinyl. The installers’ trade body calls it the most durable wallcovering. |
| Vinyl coated paper | A paper with a decorative surface sprayed or coated on in liquid form. Technically acrylic-coated and, in the trade body’s own words, “commonly mislabeled” as vinyl. This is the cheap stuff. |
| Fabric-backed vinyl | Commercial grade — hotel corridors and hospitals. |
Solid vinyl and vinyl coated are not the same product, and the names are close enough to be genuinely misleading. Check which one you are buying.
Traditional paper wallpaper expands when it gets wet with paste and shrinks as it dries. That is the whole reason the old process required “booking” — pasting the back, folding it paste-to-paste, and letting it rest a set number of minutes so the expansion happened before it went on the wall. Get the booking time wrong and you get gaps at the seams or bubbles. That single behaviour is why wallpapering had a reputation as a professional job.
Non-woven substrate does not expand. So there is no booking, no soaking tray, no paste on the floor: you roll paste onto the wall and hang the dry paper straight off the roll. It also strips off in one piece rather than requiring steam and scraping.
I cannot give you a year for when non-woven arrived. It is a German-originated product and became widespread in the European DIY market in recent decades, but I found no museum, trade-body or archival source putting a date on it, so I am not going to invent one.
A pressure-sensitive adhesive on a release liner. No water, no paste, no curing. The trade-off is inherent and unavoidable: the more reliably it stays up, the more likely it is to take paint with it.
Independent testing across nine brands over ten weeks found that adhesive strength varies enormously between brands and that is the whole story — some use adhesive strong enough to strip paint, particularly on older glossy finishes, while low-tack formulas come off easily but resist repositioning less well.
And here is the detail homeowners miss. Success depends heavily on the paint being fully cured, not merely dry. Latex paint is dry to the touch in hours and takes roughly two to four weeks to fully cure. Applying peel-and-stick to fresh paint is exactly how you pull the paint off.
Note the gap between the manufacturer’s claim — “easily applies to any smooth surface” — and every credible independent test, which conditions that on paint type, paint age, cure state, sheen and wall texture. The gap is the story.
I went looking for the data behind this piece of received wisdom in my own industry, and I want to be straight with you about what I found, which is nothing.
What is real and quantifiable is removal. A buyer who plans to strip it will price that work into their offer, and that number is knowable.
| Method | Per square foot | Time, one room |
|---|---|---|
| Dry stripping (modern strippable or non-woven) | $0.80–$1.00 | 2–3 hours |
| Steaming | $1.00–$3.00 | 6–8 hours |
| Soaking and scraping | $3.00–$8.00 | several days on difficult jobs |
| Typical whole-home job | $423–$1,192, averaging about $793 | |
Angi and HomeGuide cost aggregators, which agree closely. Costs that ambush people: wall repair, patching and priming afterward can add $100 to $1,000; skim coating runs about $1.10–$1.30 a square foot; mould remediation in a bathroom, $500–$2,300.
Notice the spread — $0.80 to $8.00 per square foot. That entire range is a function of what is underneath.
Drywall is gypsum sandwiched between paper. Wallpaper adhesive is designed to bond to paper. If the drywall was never primed and sized before the wallpaper went up, the adhesive soaks into and bonds with the drywall’s own face paper. There is then no separation plane. When you pull the wallpaper, the drywall’s face paper comes with it, exposing raw gypsum — and you are into skim-coating or replacing board.
Whether stripping your wallpaper is a Saturday or a three-thousand-dollar drywall job was decided by whoever hung it, possibly decades ago, and you cannot tell which by looking. Test a small patch in a closet before you commit to anything.
Which is also the honest answer to “should I wallpaper?” Yes — if you prime properly with a wallcovering primer/sealer first. That is a water-based product that forms a barrier paper adhesives cannot penetrate. It also extends open time so you can slide the paper into position, and some are tintable to the paper’s background colour so a seam that opens later does not flash white. You are the one deciding what the next owner faces.
NAR’s own published guidance, for what it is worth, is about dose: one accent wall or one room — a guest bath is the classic — small-scale patterns in small spaces, nature prints. One wall reads as a design choice. A whole house reads as a project.
The hazard is not the wallpaper. It is the paint underneath it.
Arsenical wallpaper is a nineteenth-century product, effectively gone from manufacture by 1900. For a Texas homeowner, finding original arsenic-bearing paper in place would require a house of genuine 19th-century vintage — vanishingly rare in most of this state, and if you have it, it is a conservation asset rather than a demolition problem.
Lead paint is the real one. The EPA’s Renovation, Repair and Painting rule covers work that disturbs paint in housing built before 1978, and requires that individual renovators and firms be certified. It covers lead-based paint — not arsenic, and not wallpaper as such. But stripping wallpaper means scraping, steaming and sanding walls that were painted before the paper went up.
Homeowners doing work in their own home are not required to be certified. The exposure is identical either way, and lead dust from sanding is the primary route into children. If you are hiring, hire a lead-safe certified firm and check the certification.
Thinking about wallpaper before you sell? Ask me first. Sometimes it is worth removing, sometimes it is the least of your worries, and once in a while it is the reason a house photographs well enough to get people through the door.
Ask me before you strip itChecked August 2026. Where sources disagree on a date or a figure I have said so in the text rather than quietly picking one.
REALTOR® · BHHS PenFed Realty Texas
I help buyers and sellers across the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex — Fort Worth, Burleson, Crowley and Keller, and the surrounding Dallas area. I write these because they are the questions I answer on the phone every week, and most people never get a straight answer to them. If you have one I have not covered, ask me — I will probably turn it into the next post.