When Elizabeth Bennet visits Pemberley, she admires the furniture, the paintings, and the view from the windows. Apparently, however, she doesn’t notice the wallpaper.
Luckily, that omission has at last been rectified: Janeites with generous budgets for interior decoration can now buy “Mr. Darcy”-patterned wallpaper panels in a color dubbed “Pemberley Green.”
The newly available three-panel pattern shows “a bird’s-eye view of a quaint English hamlet,” according to the website of the venerable fabric and wall-covering company Schumacher. Under a pale blue sky spotted with wispy clouds, we see a grand mansion with a long drive and extensive grounds, a sprinkling of more modest dwellings, a small church, and lots and lots of bucolic countryside.
For my tastes, it’s pretty enough but distractingly busy for a wall covering. I’m a minimalist by nature, though, so don’t mind me. “I would by no means suspend. . .” etc.
Schumacher created “Mr. Darcy” from a design by Johnson Hartig, the creative director of the Libertine clothing line, who—according to Vogue--has already hung the pattern in his own Los Angeles dining room. The wallpaper, in a style intended to recall 18th-century engravings, took Schumacher’s studio 250 hours to complete.
While Schumacher’s American website, geared to interior design professionals rather than retail shoppers, discreetly conceals such gaucherie as pricing, my online investigations suggests that the Mr. Darcy pattern won’t come cheap—no surprise, given those 250 hours of labor. You’re probably looking at something like $750 per panel, with each panel clocking in at 4.5 feet wide and 48 feet high.
I calculate that it would cost about $2,200 (plus installation) to turn my modestly sized office into a quaint English hamlet. On the other hand, I have zero wallpaper-buying experience, not to mention an iffy grasp of the mathematical principles involved, so I may be way off. Time to break out the wallpaper calculator!
But what does price matter when we’re talking about creative inspiration? “I've always been drawn to English history and English arts and objects,” Hartig told Vogue. “I can just see Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett [sic] walking across the foggy misty field and running into each other—I could see that happening in between the two houses in the wallpaper.”
Oh, dear.
So the inspiration for this wallpaper is not, it appears, Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice—it’s Joe Wright’s screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I guess I’ll put away my wallpaper calculator.
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