Hannah's Treasures Vintage Wallpaper Blog

May's Flowers

April showers bring May flowers
... and this year the flowers are looking pretty retro!

We have been elated to receive another load of 1960s/1970s vintage wallpaper this month, chock full of fantastic European designs. It was just one roll after another of spectacular retro papers--no duds or just 'meh' rolls here! With so many fabulous patterns to choose from, it's impossible to pick favorites, but here are a few that stand out to us today. Tomorrow, it could be a whole new bunch because they are all just that wonderful. Take a look-see:

Find these and others on our website by the roll or discover lots of fabulous patterns for smaller projects in our Etsy stores, Hannah's Treasures and Retro Wallpaper, where all the patterns are sold by the yard.

 

 

The “Vintage” Mix-Up and what makes our wallpaper so special

Unfortunately, there is some ambiguity around the word “vintage” as it relates to products you can buy.

Have you noticed it?

Sometimes vintage means “old”.

Sometimes vintage means “looks old”.

 

Sometimes vintage means “actually made in many decades past”.

Sometimes it means, “this reminds me of something from decades ago.”

 

Vintage can reference an actual time frame of some past era

OR it can be used to imply a ‘style inspired’ by yesteryear.

 

This ambiguity can be completely confusing, and frankly, annoying. When you’re shopping online and see a “vintage dress”… which is it? really vintage? or just vintage-looking? Is a ‘vintage’ table really a vintage table? How about ‘vintage’ wallpaper?

Antique Wallpaper: Selections from a 1913 Sample Book

We've said it before and we'll say it again: We love vintage wallpaper! The Hannah's Treasures vintage wallpaper collection encompasses a wide variety of genres, colors, manufacturers, printing techniques, and ages of vintage wallpaper. From the nearly 100-year-old 1920s papers to our growing collection of 1980s papers, we have wallpaper extending through seven decades of design! What a thrill it is to see these different pieces of history unroll before our very eyes each day. But even with a collection of over 20,000 rolls of authentic, old stock  wallpaper and nearly 2,000 different patterns available on our website (not including the additional papers we have on Etsy and Ebay), our collection still only showcases part of the story of vintage wallpaper-making.

Lost in Lots of Lilies

With the thousands of rolls we've added to the website this year, we're thrilled with the number of new water lily patterns we've uncovered.

A Personal Miracle, A Mystery Solved

Business is personal. And our hunts for wallpaper are deeply, deeply personal.

Each load of wallpaper that we find is the happy result of a long list of miracles. Financial miracles, communication miracles, timing miracles...bizarre circumstances that somehow preserve these large collections of paper for half a century--it takes all of these for one wallpaper load to come into our hands. We've had whole collections of wallpaper that have survived fires and building cave-ins. We've seen collections that have changed hands countless times and been the focal point family feuds. Some of these wallpaper stashes have been long-forgotten and suddenly found again, while others have been carefully maintained by fellow wallpaper-lovers looking for just the right person to pass their treasures on to.

Oh, how we could fill a book with the stories!

At the end of February, we experienced another one of these miracle loads, only this one was special for a new reason.