A New Book Celebrates Gracie Wallpaper’s Hand-Painted Splendor

With a textured blue cover and vibrant images spanning huge spreads, The Art of Gracie: Handpainted Wallpapers, Timeless Rooms is a massive new coffee table book and homage to gorgeous interiors.

The Gracie wallpaper company, still family-run in its sixth generation, began in 1898 and has decorated some of the most iconic American homes, including the White House. Their order books include such names as Astor, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller. This new tome provides the family’s back stories of antiques-hunting trips to Europe and Asia, tidbits about working with such designers as Sister Parish and Bunny Williams, and up-close images of wallpaper details—graceful magnolias and maple leaf silhouettes—and sprawling landscape scenes, like silvery birds in trees wrapping a New Orleans dining room. 

Here, a few highlights from the book, including notable Southern homes:

Family owners Mike Gracie, Jenn Gracie, and Zach Shea.

Gracie wallpaper details.

In this traditional Texas home, the Tobacco Silhouette pattern complements a more-the-merrier style of decorative layering.

For this dining room in Florida, Gracie began by sending photographs of a few different antique wallpapers to interior designer Erik R. Smith. He chose a Gracie design on a beige ground for a powder room for David Easton. But when dining in Palm Beach, saturated color and a tropical vibe feel more in tune with the place. The dreamy shade of turquoise and the bamboo motif, to which a newly created flowering vine was added, make the room feel as if it’s dissolving into the garden beyond.

Gracie wallpaper details.

In Dallas, a six-panel, eighteenth-century Japanese screen sparked the vision for this scenic wallpaper, Kano Garden. When a design disappears into the crown molding, as here, it appears to lift the ceiling.

Gracie wallpaper details.

New World in Color is a design entirely hand-painted in the style of French nineteenth-century woodblock-printed wallpapers. This room in Texas incorporates flowers and mountains, leading the eye into the distance via perspective painting.

It’s always fascinating when the furnishings and design elements in the wallpaper speak as directly to one another and to their geographic context as they do in this house in Palm Beach.

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