A young, stylish couple in Connecticut purchased a home and undertook a renovation. They contacted Scenic Wallpaper when they decided to install a combination of Zuber’s War of Independence and Views of North America in their stair hall, going up the curved wall of the staircase and continuing around the circular landing on the second floor as well as down along a hallway on the first floor.

Views of North America was first printed by Zuber in 1834, containing four scenes: the Bay of New York, West Point, the Port of Boston, and the Natural Bridge of Virginia and Niagara Falls.

The design for the War of Independence, first printed in 1852, uses the same background landscapes and the same woodblocks from Views of North America but adds foreground imagery depicting scenes from the American Revolution. The panels illustrate important moments including the capture of a British stronghold at Weehawk Hill, the surrender of British General Cornwallis at Yorktown, the arrival of General Washington into Boston, and two battle scenes.

War of Independence, with the added imagery, is printed in 360 colors and requires an additional 600 woodblocks for printing, for a total of 2300 blocks.

The Staircase

The stairway was the biggest challenge, since the walls were curved and the level of the ground in the scenery needed to ascend with the stairs to avoid ending up with only sky toward the top of the stairs. A custom scaffold was built for the space so that we could install the paper from floor to ceiling and complete the artwork.

Each panel on the stairs was intentionally mismatched in order to step them up gradually, and we added artwork to blend the seams after the installation was finished. This also meant that the dégradé in the sky was mismatched on every panel, which we corrected by airbrushing nearly the entire sky to blend the colors of the blue and the horizon. This was a big project, and the placement of each panel was planned purposefully and thoughtfully to make sure that the added artwork would look natural.

Upstairs

On the upstairs landing, we needed to add some artwork as well to blend the ground pattern into the sky in a natural way.

Downstairs

One more mismatch was created on the first level beside a short set of stairs. We managed this in the same way as the main staircase, just less of a dramatic shift.

There were several doorways and archways on both floors, so we installed matching plain blue sky above the doorways and added missing artwork along the archways or along the top of the doors as needed. This allowed us to cut and continue the pattern on each side of the door, rather than losing any of the original artwork where the doors were located.

Rather than continuing the wallpaper in a small area under the stairs, we created a seam and added artwork there as well.

A few more finishing touches included papering and painting the switch plate covers to match the paper, painting the sensors to match, and painting the sides of a blind door.