BUTTERFLIES FOR THE WALL

I got a roll of a classic Finnish wallpaper I've always liked and wanted to put up somewhere: Perhonen (Butterfly)! It will come up on one wall in Dag's room, which is still in the making (quite a long in-the-making, I know. It's not as if he's in a hurry to move out of our bedroom any time soon you know, and I just haven't gotten around to empty and change the messy study yet...)


The butterfly wallpaper was designed by Ritva Kronlund for Pihlgren & Ritola. The cherry blossom wallpaper that's one of my favourites and the snowflake- one I  had a few flats ago are also designed by Kronlund. I scout wallpapers all across the internet but always end up getting all of them (well, almost) from Tapettitalo (that carry all the old P&R wallpapers) in the end!


Perhonen has been in production for decades. It is labelled as a 50's wallpaper but I am not sure weather it was designed so far back or in the 70's, as most of her famous ones are from then. There is also a rather intensive black version available of the butterflies.

THE BROWN ROOM

There is one room downstairs in the farm house, behind the door with the chipped paint, that you have not seen that much of. Well, anything of really. A room that at some point will become a proper study & guest room.

The past year it has been full of left ocrs from the renovation as well as old and nice and old and ugly furniture without a place for their own. Plus Eddi's windsurfing gear and geology stuff an my dead plants I tried to keep alive in there during winter.

We've aimed to fix it up to level one every free weekend this year we'e had but so far no luck...

It will however turn out great when it's  done, eventually. For now it has no electricity and an ugly plastic carpet on the floor which I to start with, before getting it properly done (that'd be level one), intend to cover with lots and lots of rag rugs.


It has the nicest light in the house with windows in two directions and old wallpaper that is both yucky and pretty at the same time.

WHO IS THE FAIREST OF THE LARKS? / THE BEDROOM WALLPAPER

Whenever I post something from our bedroom in the city flat I get the question where our wallpaper is from. So lets give it a post of it's own then shall we.

The wallpaper is called "Ken Kiuruista Kaunein",  translating "who is the fairest of the larks?"

It was designed by Finnish ceramic artist and designer Birger Kaipiainen (1915-1988) in the 1950's.

I had seen bits of it before, online and the test sheets they have of it, and always wondered what the hell was going on there; if you look at just a detail of it it's kind of weird and the birds sort of ugly. Well, yeah. But once I saw a picture of the wallpaper on a wall I was totally smitten by it. It builds up a beautiful pattern.

Well of course, this is really the way it is with all wallpapers, you have to see them at large to really get an idea. Some patterns that look great when seen as a detail in a catalogue may be a disappointment on the wall; personally I don't like it with decorative patterns that although they are made to appear asymmetrical turn "stripy" when put together, for example.

Ken Kiuruista Kaunein comes in four color variations. It was made for and is still made by PR-tapetit / Tapettitehdas and you can get it from Tapettitalo, where is where we have bought all our wallpapers from. (I'm also assuming that you by now figured out tapetti is Finnish for wallpaper.)

 

More known than the beautiful larks is the wallpaper "Kiurujen Yö" (The Night of the Larks), which is said to be the most famous wallpaper in Finland. It is, obviously, also by Birger Kaipiainen and comes in many colors; the picture above shows two. (Image from Kotivinkki magazine.)

(And btw by now you probably also notice you can fit whole sentences into just two words in Finnish. Or, in fact, one. End of mini-langauge lessons.)

Another little btw, there's an exhibition of Birger Kaipiainen's ceramics at Emma, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, which is just around the corner from us.

BOTANICAL

Among those things you plan forever and one day actually get done, or almost:

Apart form the raspberry wallpaper that had been lurking in my head for years I also had the idea forever of framing old pages from a biology book and putting them up in the countryside kitchen. The past years I've seen such posters and pages more and more in magazines and interior blogs. I had checked out plenty on etsy and such, both old and newly printed, but the whole thing kind of lingered.

Now I don't even want such for the (new) kitchen anymore, I have new plans for what to put on those walls, but some time ago I stil grabbed the old idea and ordered a few random pages from an old botanical book via Lundagård. Will put these pictures elsewhere, somewhere.

At about the same time Ikea started selling similar pictures too, already framed... well of course they did. (pic from Ikea)

Sandberg also has a wallpaper with the theme, Botanica. Beautiful, but for a swooning 407e (!!? read it in a mag but must have been a typo?) per roll I think I'll just stick to old book pages in frames. From ikea. Or glue them directly to the wall like that. Why not, if the space allows it? (pic form Sandberg)

RASPBERRY

I love it when you have an idea you've been waiting to realize forever and then you finally get around doing it and it turns out just as you planned; right - we put up wallpaper in the small hall between the back porch, kitchen, laundry closet and bathroom-in-the-making.  As it is pretty much just a walk-trough space with four doors no one ever really stays in I wanted the walls to be bright, colorful and heavily patterned, kind of like a piece of candy you can spot from the other more calm rooms. En karamell.

And I wanted it to be this exact wallpaper, Vadelma (translated: raspberry). Kind of looking like something people would have put up during a previous renovation in the sixties that we would have discovered under the eighties wall paper we torn away.

Like most of our other wall paper also Vadelma is from Tapettitalo, a company that sells old and classic patterns from past decades and centuries as well as vintage dead stock of old their factory rolls. The doors are old, we've moved them around a bit from room to room, opening to opening.

I know this post totally makes it seem like I would have been putting these up but I so did not this time (phew), the handy men and Eddi did it.


Bonus pic: You can see the bathroom coming along in the background. But that is still for laters, as is the kitchen... but looking pretty good so far, right?