With the right decor, a room can be an experience, breathtaking and transportive. The master artisans at de Gournay, the world-famous British luxury interiors company, delight in curating these experiences. Delivering exquisitely hand-painted, custom-made wallpapers that fit a room like a couture dress, they’re reviving a pre-industrial Chinese art form—the laborious process that produces the world’s most beautiful and evocative wallpapers.
“Erdem” on Adam Grey dyed silk. (Courtesy of de Gournay)
It began in the early 1980s, when Claud Cecil Gurney wanted to restore some antique Chinoiserie wallpaper in his family home in London. To his surprise, it wasn’t easy. Overtaken by industrialized mass production, the technique of painting Chinoiserie by hand was dying out in China, where he was only able to locate a single supplier. Alarmed that the art form was disappearing, Gurney sought out artists whose parents and grandparents had been trained in the ancient Chinese brush stroke techniques essential to Chinoiserie watercolor painting. He formed a small team of five artists, and in 1986, de Gournay was born….