Montpelier makeover: James Madison was a wallpaper man
In May, Monticello unveiled a dining room redo in eye-popping chrome yellow. This week, another presidential house, Montpelier, announces that the dining room of the Father of the Constitution will be transformed from “drab to fab” with period wallpaper— and says the makeover has nothing to do with keeping up with the Jeffersons.
“We all admire Monticello,” says Montpelier VP Lynne Hastings. “We’ve been working the past year and a half to restore this wallpaper. It’s much more of a detective story.”
On Constitution Day two years ago, Montpelier unveiled a $24-million architectural restoration that stripped away the pink stucco exterior added by a 20th-century owner and returned the house’s look to what James and Dolley Madison knew.
“Now we’re in the refurnishing stage,” says Hastings.
Historians don’t know exactly what pattern the Madisons might have chosen, but they do know the couple were “very enamored of the French taste,” says Hastings. That led the restoration team to Henri Virchaux, a Philadelphia designer popular among the swell set in 1815, the year the Madisons bought wallpaper for Montpelier.
Another ah-ha moment that swung the swatch choice toward this particular pattern of floral swags across a green background: an 1836 list of the dining room furnishings of Montpelier revealing— ta-da— green chairs.
The reproduction wallpaper, dubbed Virchaux Drapery, has been made by (more)