There's a small workshop in Paris where three friends spend their days doing something almost nobody else in the world still does: printing wallpaper by hand, using 18th-century wood blocks, the same way it was done before machines took over.
The atelier is called Antoinette Poisson, named after a real woman — a paper seller in pre-Revolutionary Paris who supplied the domino papers used to line drawers, cover books, and dress up modest rooms that couldn't afford the silk damask of the aristocracy. Domino paper was the affordable version of luxury: bold, repeating patterns, printed in small workshops and sold by the sheet. Most of it was thrown away, glued over, or lost to time. Antoinette Poisson's founders — Julie Stordiau, Vincent Farelly, and Jean-Baptiste Martin — went looking for what survived, in flea markets, private archives, and the back rooms of French museums, and started printing it again exactly as it was found.
That's the part that makes their work different from almost anything else you'll find in wallpaper today. These aren't reproductions in the loose sense — patterns "inspired by" old French interiors. They're often the actual 18th-century designs, hand block-printed with the original mix of restraint and exuberance that only comes from a pattern being drawn by someone's hand, then carved into wood, then pressed onto paper one sheet at a time. You can see it in the slight imperfections — a line that wavers just a little, a color that sits unevenly at the edge. That's not a flaw. That's proof nobody rushed it.
One of the patterns we're especially glad made it into the shop is the Grenades Wallpaper Panel 2B — a pattern built around the pomegranate, which shows up again and again in historic French textiles and papers as a symbol of abundance. It's rich without being loud: a repeating motif in a palette that reads as confident in a dining room, a powder room, or as a single statement panel behind a headboard. It's the kind of paper that makes a room feel like it has a history, even if you hung it last week.
If you're new to the idea of hanging wallpaper with this kind of pedigree, start small. A powder room, a stair landing, the back of a bookshelf, the inside of a closet door — these are the places where a bold historic pattern gets to be the whole point, without asking you to commit an entire room to it. And because these papers are printed the old way, in limited runs, what's in stock now won't necessarily be in stock later.
We carry a small, considered edit of Antoinette Poisson's work — you can see the full collection of wallpapers here, including Grenades and the other patterns we've brought in. Each one carries the same story: a pattern someone almost lost, found again, and printed by hand in a Paris workshop that still believes that's worth doing.
