Chinoiserie Wallpaper

Chinoiserie wallpaper takes the birds, blossoms, pagodas and dragons of Chinese export art and sets them loose on a wall. Some of ours are dense, songbirds and peony branches crowding navy and teal grounds. Others are pale scenic toiles. And two are tigers in pop colors.

Choosing chinoiserie wallpaper

Where it works

Chinoiserie wants a wall people sit and look at. Behind a bed, the long side of a dining room, or a powder room, where shutting the door closes you in with a whole scene. The navy in Apple Songbird stands up to strong daylight, and after dark it pulls an evening room in close. Got a north-facing room? The cream and pale grey grounds of Peony Thicket and Silver Songbird keep it from shrinking in on itself.

Picking between the designs

Start by asking how much ground you want to see. Apple Songbird and Peony Thicket are packed edge to edge, and from across the room they read as one rich texture. Pagoda Toile and Scarlet Finch leave bare ground between the motifs, which keeps them calm in a small space. Then the dragons. Celestial Dragons, Fire Cloud and Jade Serpent are the least floral of the lot (we'd put them in a study or a hallway). Tigers & Dragons and the Tiger Magnolia Mural are pop chinoiserie in flat color, made for a nursery. A practical note on hanging. The branches and birds are big, so for a whole room we'd go with paste-the-wall LUXE Traditional, which gives you time to line them up across every seam. On a single wall, Peel and Stick is fine.

Related

Chinoiserie sits between bird wallpaper and toile wallpaper, with a good deal of floral wallpaper in it too. The style's history runs from export porcelain to hand-painted panels, and What is chinoiserie tells it.