Homeowners are paying thousands for wallpaper, even for just a panel

When Heather Dewberry Stoller started dating her now-husband Steve Stoller, she knew she liked him. His hand-painted wallpaper was just a bonus.

“Those pretty panels sealed the deal and were part of his decorating dowry when we married,” Dewberry Stoller, an interior designer and founder of Huff-Dewberry in Atlanta, said over email.

That decorating dowry encompassed two rectangular panels of cream-colored wallpaper showcasing a delicate assemblage of curving trees and birds in flight, a chinoiserie-style garden vista set within gold frames. Today, the panels sit in the couple’s primary bedroom, and Dewberry Stoller loves seeing them when she wakes up.

The designer isn't the only one with a fondness for wallpaper panels. The U.S. wallpaper market is expanding; it was pegged at roughly $2.3 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow 4.7% annually until 2032. According to market researcher Credence Research, part of this rise stems from innovative digital printing techniques and an uptick in home improvement interest, as homeowners face challenging economic conditions, some are staying put, renovating the home they have instead of moving into a new one.

But luxury wallcovering brands, such as Gracie and de Gournay, say they’re seeing demand increase, too.

“We are busier than ever before,” said Jennifer Gracie, the company’s creative director.

Influencers and celebrities alike have embraced the product, popularizing the aesthetic for a generation of consumers that might’ve associated wallpaper with a different, less modern, era.

“We’ve seen a significant surge in demand for completely bespoke pieces that go beyond our standard collections — clients are increasingly looking for designs tailored specifically to their interiors,” Jemma Cave, design director of de Gournay, a London-headquartered interiors company that creates luxury hand-painted and embroidered wallcoverings, said via email. Like Gracie, de Gournay papers and fabrics can run into the hundreds and thousands of dollars per panel.

The panels Dewberry Stoller sees each morning come from Gracie, the New York-based maker of hand-painted wallpaper that traces its origins to 1898, when it got its start as an antique dealer and importer. Around the 1920s, founder Charles R. Gracie met with a friend who, inspired by the European wallpaper born out of the 1600s tea trade, toted hand-painted wallpaper from China to New York, wondering how the product might sell in the U.S. market.

The opulent wallpaper gained traction in wealthy families across the United States, doing well enough over the years for Gracie to bring the artisan production process in-house, launching its own chinoiserie-style designs inspired by historic wallpapers and by the antiques the family sourced. The move allowed the company to mold their offerings to client needs, customizing designs and making sure each paper fit precisely into the room it was made for.

Today, more than a century after its founding, Gracie remains family-owned, run by third, fourth and fifth generations. “It’s definitely a niche business,” said Jennifer Gracie, a fifth-generation member of the family. Amid today’s world of mass-produced wall coverings and peel-and-stick offerings, there’s a narrowing pool of artisanal companies like Gracie, making its wallpapers all the more rare.

The business still makes wallpaper the way it has for decades, working with a studio of more than 150 trained artists in China who paint each wallpaper panel by hand. Some of the papers are even painted on antiqued pieced panels — an aesthetic that calls back to a time before large-format paper manufacturing, when wallpaper installations comprised a collage of smaller-sized squares.

“This is something that requires a great attention to detail, and we are extremely conscientious about quality control,” Jennifer Gracie said. “We are very detail-oriented … a certain design has to have a certain type of flower, a certain style of leaf, a certain style of bird, and those attentions to detail have to be followed meticulously, so it takes a great deal of time to be trained to be a Gracie artist.”

The handcrafting and attention to detail means that today’s customers can request tweaks that make an already unique design completely one-of-a-kind. Some specifications focus on a specific shade of background color, while other requests home in on the details. “Someone can say that they would like a bird’s nest with three little baby birds to represent their three children,” Jennifer Gracie said, “or we can hide a little heart with initials on a tree for the couple who lives in the home, or we can include the client’s dog in the order. We can really make it as custom as they would like.”

Each hand-painted wallpaper order from Gracie can take anywhere from weeks to months to complete. Before a custom wallpaper order is painted and shipped, Gracie goes back and forth with their client — often an interior designer working on behalf of the homeowner — completing a sketch that shows the wallpaper within its room, allowing Gracie and the client to make any changes necessary.

The artistry and customization come at a cost: Today, individual framed Gracie panels — like the ones Dewberry Stoller’s now-husband sourced — cost more than $1,000. Depending on the size of a room and complexity of the order, full spaces finished with custom Gracie wallpaper cost many times that figure.

Elizabeth Boland, who runs Wilson Boland Design alongside her mother, Carolyn Wilson, has integrated custom Gracie paper into two different interiors projects, both using the company’s popular “Hampton Garden” design and planned down to the fraction of an inch.

“It’s just nerve-racking placing that order because you double, triple, quadruple check all your measurements,” explained the Maryland-based designer. Before its studio begins work on an order, Gracie sends along a drawing of precisely how its wallpaper will fit in the room, allowing for client comments and edits.

“You send your remarks back, they send it back, and then you’re like ‘oh, wait, no, there’s a sconce there,’” Boland said. “One time I had to say: ‘OK, please move all the birds, I’m going to be hanging a mirror here, and I don’t want to have a wasted butterfly being hidden by a mirror.’”

Once the wallpaper actually arrives, installation is a whole other journey. “I wouldn’t trust just any installer with a Gracie project that’s hand painted,” Boland said. “There’s too many things that can go wrong.” Instead, Boland and other designers rely on trusted specialists experienced in handling these products that bridge the gully between wall covering and artwork.

Not all homeowners have the budget for hand-painted wallpaper, framed panel or otherwise.

“I have so many clients who would love to have Gracie in their home, but, obviously for budgeting reasons, it doesn’t always fit with every project,” Boland noted. But rising interest means more wallpaper options.

“Because it is so popular, there are so many look-for-less options coming out daily,” Boland said. Brands like Thibaut Design, Kravet, and Schumacher have midrange options, and brands such as York Wallcoverings can offer “night-and-day price differences,” Boland said.

One person’s customized wallpaper is not for everyone. A previous homeowner might’ve spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on the hand-painted orange wallpaper they adored, but the current homeowner looks at orange and feels queasy, so off the wall it comes.

For that reason, some homeowners install their hand-painted wallpaper over muslin backings, which means that they can preserve the wallpaper and take it with them if they move.

“I actually have a client right now who lost their home in the Malibu fire, and they're living right now in a temporary rental,” Jennifer Gracie said. “So they’re buying our wallpaper, but … are going to install it over fabric so that they will be able to remove it and then install it in their permanent home once they rebuild.”

But other times, the luxury wallpaper that gets left behind becomes a homebuyer treasure.

In 2017, when Heather Dewberry Stoller married Steve Stoller — the boyfriend with the Gracie panels — the couple searched for a home where they could combine families, as they both had children from previous relationships. One house they looked at had a surprise inside: Gracie’s “Celadon Garden” wallpaper hanging in the dining room.

“Steve cautioned me not to buy the house for the wallpaper, but it was certainly a deciding factor!” Dewberry Stoller said. The couple ended up buying the house, and that blue-green wallpaper patterned with birds and trees “has been a beautiful backdrop for our lives as a blended family.”

“Funny thing — the selling real estate agent advised that it would be 'easy to strip' the paper if I wanted," Dewberry Stoller recalled. "She had no idea what it was and its value.”