Aesthetic walls and ceilings. (Design Notes).(Christian Herter)

One of the hallmarks of interior design during the time of the aesthetic movement was the concept of a room as a total work of art. This meant that everything from the color of the walls to the shape of a doorknob or the silk selected to make the tassels for trimming a curtain had to be not only beautiful but contribute to the aesthetic harmony of the interior. The talented designer Christian Herter created objects and interiors that relied on dense patterning for the interior decorating firm Herter Brothers. In her essay "Patronage and the British Interior" in Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen notes that seven distinct patterns comprise the painted ceilings and walls in the Board of Officers (now Clark) Room (one of the very few of the firm's interiors that survive, even in part) in the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City.

Christian Herter received a patent for fourteen wallpaper designs in 1879, but not a single printed example survives, and the drawin gs he provided to the patent office are uncolored. However, colored prints of rooms the firm created for some of the most affluent individuals of the 1870s and 1880s demonstrate that many different patterns are visible on the textiles used for upholstery, curtains, and carpets, and the marquetry that embellished furniture.

In this period wallpapers were conceived as an ensemble of three parts: the paper used on the dado, the paper from the dado to ceiling border (known as fill), and the border, or frieze. Ceilings were also covered with wallpaper. The papers Herter patented fall into two categories: ...