Having spent months working on moms old house, every room had a different wall paper over "beaver board". Aka 3ply cardboard. This was built either as staff cottage or cheap housing. They also skipped the built ins. In moms house in the 20's or 30's updates they used linoleum rugs

they also painted the hardwood floors to simulate having a rug

I agree with everything your're saying about homes. Wallpaper sounds like an interesting idea. I'm not sure if I could commit to it though. (Lots of work involved and goes back to the commitment/ tattoo thing!) I currently have quite a bit of art that I really like with nowhere to display. I feel I've hit the max amount of stuff I want to have on my walls and adding more feels cluttery. :( I think if you add wallpaper with pattern one may have to edit their art down even more because of the busy factor. I'm looking forward to the day of removing all carpeting and adding built ins. That or moving!

Very interesting analysis, anele! Like everything, I suppose, it comes down to a matter of personal preference. In my view, I agree with Sheeisback--I personally wouldn't mix patterned wallpaper with wall art. In my new (new to me, but old) house I'm doing an accent wall in the living room of stacked rock, and repeating it in the kitchen as my backsplash. I should mention that my living room and eat-in kitchen will be one great room. The other wall, the one that starts in the living room and goes all the way to the end of the eat in area, will be a textured wallpaper in an almost white (super light gray). Floors will be fake hardwood, whitewashed. Two large area rugs, one in LR and a somewhat smaller one under the white dinette set, will be maroon, gray, and white. That's enough, possibly more than enough, for my taste. There won't be anything hanging on the walls. Oh, I should say that the wall to be papered has a good sized bay window in the LR and an average sized window in the ear-in area that I might make bigger. They also add visual interest.

I have a substantial collection of wall art. It's going in my master bedroom this time around, where it will be the star, not competing with the accent wall and textured wallpaper.

One piece of advice. Don't go crazy with the wallpaper. My mother, bless her heart, retired a little too early. She got bored. Wallpapered a wall. Then another. Then another. Pretty soon every single room in their home was completely wallpapered, all four walls. She got bored again. Then did the wallpaper top border thing on every single wall. There was family agreement, behind her back of course, that the borders didn't seem to go at all with the main wallpaper. THEN...she did an armchair rail height strip of border everywhere!!! LOL we couldn't get over it. In one small bedroom we counted six different patterns of wallpaper! In my opinion, less is more. When we had to sell the house, we lost tens of thousands of dollars because of the crazy wallpaper.

But on the other hand, you know what? That crazy wallpaper made her happy. She loved putting it up, and she loved the way it looked. My dad was happy she had something to do that made her happy. It was beautiful to HER, so who cares what my brothers and I thought? She was the one living there and I say if she wanted 50 patterns, if it made her happy, then that's what counts. I know for sure that you can never please everybody, so just please yourself and make your home beautiful to YOU. :-)

Interesting Anele (you always come up with thought provoking posts)! I am not a fan of wallpaper and do not have any in our home right now. Had it in our first two homes and when we built this one almost 20 years ago, the kitchen was all that was papered. That's gone! I have seen some homes with interesting little nooks or an entry, etc. with wallpaper that I have admired. Not enough to actually consider it in my own home though! LOL I would much rather art than wallpaper. New trim can be installed, or present trim beefed up. Book cases/built-ins can be added - things like that for interest. More costly than wallpaper, I know. Use of other items besides prints/paintings can be used as art though. I have a vintage shutter in my dining room, an old mirror in that room also. In the great room on a narrow wall (short wall from entry to a corner) there is a piece of old metal work (might have been part of a gate or fencing, I really can't remember what it is). In another room I have an old window top from a church hanging (just the half circle part, not the long window that hung below), so there are many more items and some less costly than prints/paintings. Not to say wallpaper wouldn't be lovely, though!

I love wallpaper!

I am getting urges to wallpaper my powder room.

I love wallpaper, too. We did our powder room last year, and it totally transformed the space. I am itching to do it in the dining room-- not a big pattern, but a something more muted, with texture. When I look at some of the nicer decor magazines, like Architectural Digest, so many of the high-end homes have wallpaper and art. They are certainly not mutually exclusive. It just has to be done right. That's the more daunting thing for me. I dread making a mistake with the art hanging and ending up with exposed holes in my new wallpaper.

It's wonderful in small doses. A living room that is like an old parlor or "front room." In a dining room that is not open to the kitchen and family room. A bathroom or powder room. A bedroom. It can add a lot of fun to a room. Or it can be something you loathe and detest. I had both kinds of wallpaper in my last house--a non-offensive formal floral pattern in the dining room that went OK with the rest of the house, and a hideous teal, mauve and pink modern floral border in my bedroom that screamed the worst of the 80's but that I never found the time to remove. The problem with removing that border was not so much the border, that would have been simple, but the elaborate woodwork and carpet were both teal, so the whole entire room had to be stripped out and repainted and re-carpeted, which never got on the priority list due to other projects. I think that's where you can get into trouble with wallpaper, making such a strong statement with it that everything else in the house has to match it or bow down to its statement, including paint trim, upholstery and carpeting. Or else you get a real jolt and sense of discontinuity when going from room to room in the house. So then you get tired of it, redo the wallpaper and now all the other stuff is off. I think it is kinda nice used sparingly when it plays nice with all the other elements of your house, rather than the other way around. And you can hang art on wallpaper as long as it is framed properly and the wallpaper and the art don't fight. But now I have an open concept house and wallpaper is more or less out unless it is just on one accent wall. Or perhaps the relatively closed in dining room, but I don't think so for that since it is already closed in and I don't want to further close it in with some busyness on the walls. At this point I have so much beloved art I think wallpaper is out for me for now.

Before I remodeled the kitchen and DR they had a very quiet, very washable, wallpaper with tiny pineapples. I liked that wallpaper so much I had it in two different houses, and still have some of it as drawer liner. I kept an extra roll because I had to replace the panels behind the sink every couple of years, when they became too grungy.

I love old fashioned calendar prints. I'm displaying two in my family DR--one belonged to my grandmother; another one, in a carved frame, was my aunt's. Somewhere I have a folder of 1960's calendar print cutters, which my grandmother gave me in the early 1970's. I keep thinking that one day I might have a nautical themed room.

Debbie B. your story kind of reminds me of my mother, who used to paint houses and hang wallpaper for a living. She loves big flowers and fruit, and borders, and chair rail. In the early 1970's she had red flocked paper in the bedroom.

I prefer paint on perfect walls, but wallpaper will cover a multitude of sins.

Interesting. This house is approx. 106 years old. I'm sure there was wallpaper when it was built and there was plenty when we moved in, which got promptly stripped off. (It was gawdawful) There is not a lot of wall space, due to doors, windows and fireplaces but I do have a lot of vintage art prints, old frames and photos of my ancestors on the walls. I have some vintage paintings ... all were found in thrift stores.