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Illustration by Alex Siklos
Just when I think all the gold-striped wallpaper is gone, I find more of it under an innocuous white wallpaper in a stairwell. Sigh. I score, squirt and scrape and tote away yet another garbage bag, heavy with the damp shreds of 40-year-old paper. This wallpaper pattern has been a constant in my life as we moved from house to house.
But it makes me wonder: Am I forging a new vision of my house for the future, or discarding a family legacy? I am both invigorated by the fresh palette of possibility and grieving the loss of … I’m not sure what.
The first photo of that striped wallpaper appears in our family album, dated Montreal, 1969. It shows my mother in our dining room. She beams with a goofy, happy smile telegraphing how she feels about that house. Leaded glass windows, built-in oak bookcases, butler’s pantry, maid’s room off the kitchen, claw-foot bathtubs. She was in the house of her dreams, having climbed the property ladder from a tiny bungalow to a nearby side split and then the leap to a row house in lower Westmount. Now she had advanced “up the hill” to just below the Boulevard. She would have happily lived there the rest of her life. That’s what her smile said: I have arrived. Life is good.
How was she to see the October Crisis on the horizon? My father’s employer got cold feet and moved his division out of Montreal in 1971. But on that day in 1969, my mother was joyful. Clearly believing this was their forever home, my parents dove into considerable redecorating of their old duplex. All the trappings of late 1960s modern décor: wall-to-wall carpet over the hardwood floors, a cool Danish dinette set. The wallpaper, two-toned gold vertical stripes on a field of white, was probably pretty hip in those days.
The gold wallpaper was my mother’s pick. Well, everything was. I helped my dad strip off the home’s existing wallpaper in the dining room, a grass cloth option that I rather liked. In my 10-year-old mind, it was expensive and chic. But the gold stripes went up anyway, in that and every other house my parents subsequently owned as my dad’s company bounced him around three provinces. My mother’s preferences never varied: Gold stripes in the dining room, entrance hallway and an accent wall in the living room.
London, Ont., is where they landed for good in 1980. They bought a house and up went the gold-striped wallpaper: dining room, entrance hallway and accent wall in the living room. All family photos of birthday dinners and Christmas trees feature those stripes. Hairstyles change, grandchildren arrive and grow, great-grandchildren appear but the stripes remain omnipresent in the background.
Now, with both my parents gone, I bought their old house and want to forge my own style. As Oscar Wilde reportedly said on his deathbed, “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.”
Admittedly, things were not that dire but I couldn’t wait to get rid of it. A weekend project I thought. I got my painter on deck for a quick coat of Chantilly Lace white when I finished.
As expected, the gold stripes peeled off easily but not to reveal the expected builder’s beige paint. What emerged was a jolly floral motif of multicoloured bouquets on all four walls. I considered the pattern almost beautiful – until I saw how glued down it was. Decades ago, the wallpaper hanger went crazy on the glue. Insanely crazy. Dislodging even a few inches was challenging.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Visualizing the clean look of Chantilly Lace, I persevered. I removed the gold stripes with scoring and warm water, then strip off the top layer of floral print with diluted dish detergent, painstakingly scraping off the yellow backing inch by inch, and washed off the sticky glue. It took weeks, not a weekend. But it also felt good, calming even, to see the stripes and flowers yield to an expanding blank canvas of white plaster.
Something else emerged from my scraping: my dad’s pencil marks of plumb lines and figures calculating a wall’s dimensions. Every strip of stripes I scraped off was a strip he had hung. There was some guilt. But just briefly. My mother might feel deeply betrayed to see her décor choice discarded, but my father was a pragmatic guy. It’s just paper after all. It’s your house now. Make what you want of it.
The stripes are finally gone: from the dining room, entrance hall, the stairwell, the living room. A small section remains behind a floor-to-ceiling mirror, a nod to my wallpaper family legacy that I’ll tell my grandchildren about. My daughter wants to stay in this house when I’m gone so I’ll maintain it like my parents did. New roof when needed, service the furnace annually and we’ll need a new air conditioner soon. What design choices of mine will she question? Maybe everything. But sobeit. Chantilly Lace is just paint.
Alison Cunningham lives in London, Ont.