When President Lyndon Johnson addressed the American nation from his ranch in Texas, the wall behind him wore a scenic mural called Memory Lane. It was a Thibaut, and it was entirely in character, because for the better part of a century and a half this has been the wallpaper of American life.
The firm was founded in 1886 by Richard Thibaut, an ambitious New Yorker of Parisian descent who began by selling his wallcoverings door to door from a horse-drawn cart, before opening a shop in downtown Manhattan just before the turn of the century. He is long gone, but the business he built is still very much with us: the oldest continuously operating wallpaper house in America, and this year, rather remarkably, one hundred and forty years old.
Jelly Fish, Summer House by Thibaut
Burlwood Block, Texture Resource 6 by Thibaut
"When a president addressed the nation from his Texas ranch, the wall behind him was a Thibaut."
Some of Richard's habits have proved astonishingly durable. The wallpaper book, the bound sample album he devised so that customers could leaf through his patterns, is still, in essence, the way the entire industry shows its wares today. Not many businesses can say they wrote the rulebook their rivals go on using for the next hundred and forty years.
Tiger Flock, Natural Resource 2 by Thibaut
Point Lobos, Natural Resource 3 by Thibaut
The wallpaper of the American century
Thibaut has a way of turning up at the interesting moments. During the Depression, House & Garden ran a feature titled The Beauty of Thibaut Wallpaper, a small dose of glamour for a country that badly needed one. Its scenic murals, with wonderfully evocative names like Ships Haven, Memory Lane and Magnolia Hill, hung in countless mid-century sitting rooms, and its designs have since appeared everywhere from the walls of the White House to the set of Forrest Gump. For a product so often dismissed as mere decoration, it has kept remarkably grand company.
Desert Flower, Ochre, Vista by Thibaut
"Depression-era parlours, mid-century sitting rooms, film sets and the White House: Thibaut has papered them all."
What lifts this above a history lesson is that the company has never once coasted on its past. Everything is still drawn by an in-house studio, and the collections move with real confidence between the traditional and the contemporary: the crisp botanical, the preppy stripe, the handsome grasscloth, the chinoiserie, the sunny geometrics that read as unmistakably, cheerfully American. This is a house that reveres its archive without being remotely imprisoned by it.
Ridge, Birch, Vista by Thibaut
Pima Braid, Grey, Natural Resource 3 by Thibaut
Bringing a little America home
Alpine, Spa Blue, Vista by Thibaut
Lacinato, Mineral, Vista by Thibaut
There is a particular pleasure, for a British decorator, in that American accent. Where our own heritage houses tend towards the faded and the understated, Thibaut embraces colour and pattern with an optimism that can lift an entire room. A confident botanical in a downstairs cloakroom, a fresh stripe in a child's bedroom, a scenic mural across a dining-room wall: this is pattern that positively wants you to enjoy it. It suits the temper of the times, too, as the appetite returns for rooms with colour, character and a little preppy nerve after too many years of grey good behaviour.
St. Thomas, Pavilion by Thibaut
Tetons, Grey, Vista by Thibaut
For most of its life Thibaut has sold only to the trade, which is part of why its papers have always carried a certain insider cachet, the sort of thing you spotted in a decorator's scheme and could not quite place. Having the collections at Wallpaper Sales puts that within easy reach. As ever with colour and pattern this considered, it is worth ordering a sample and living with it in your own light for a few days, particularly with the bolder designs, which can change character entirely between a bright morning room and a candlelit supper.
Vortex, Ochre, Vista by Thibaut
Ridge Weave, Mineral, Vista by Thibaut
Lacinato, Black, Vista by Thibaut
Woodland Clearing, Green, Boxwood by Thibaut
For a firm that began with a young man, a cart full of wallpaper and a good deal of nerve, it has been an extraordinary innings. A hundred and forty years on, Thibaut is still doing precisely what Richard set out to do: putting a little beauty, and a little confidence, on the wall.
