“It’s paper restoration, it’s artwork,” says Jim Francis, gesturing toward a series of intricately painted panels from Zuber’s Les Zones Terrestres in his firm’s Upper West Side studio. “It’s all of those techniques—but on a grand scale.”
For more than three decades, Scenic Wallpaper—led by founders Francis and partner John Nalewaja—has been the preeminent studio designers call for rare wallpaper installation and specialized restoration projects. Whether hanging a Gracie Studio custom-painted wallpaper in a Bedford home for AD100 designer Sheila Bridges or reviving Dufour’s Jardin de Bagatelle at a historic mansion in Highland Park, Illinois, their practice demands not only technical precision but an archivist’s command of the decorative arts. Clients have included Bergdorf Goodman, the Hearst family (for a project at their Wyntoon estate in California) and the US Embassy in Helsinki. Most recently, their work appeared on the cover of Aerin Lauder: Living with Flowers after the team restored a 200-plus-year-old, hand-painted Chinese wallpaper in Lauder’s dining room.
A Rare Zuber Resurfaces
When descendants of the late Pittsburgh banker and philanthropist Richard King Mellon uncovered a cache of Zuber panels in a storage area of their Pennsylvania estate, Woodlea, the family turned to Scenic Wallpaper to bring them back to life. Carefully removed from what is believed to have been a home office, the wallpaper had been packed away and nearly forgotten. Architectural Digest actually published the home, designed by Gertrude Mellon, in its October 1977 issue. Though Les Zones Terrestres was not pictured in the feature, it mirrors Mrs. Mellon’s playful curiosity and keen interest in the natural world. “I always put a little fantasy, a little whimsy into whatever I design,” she told AD at the time.
First block-printed in 1855 using 2,050 hand-carved woodblocks, Les Zones Terrestres is a sweeping visual encyclopedia of different climates around the continents. Designed by Eugene Ehrmann (one of the creators of Zuber’s beloved Eldorado) with the assistance of Théophile Schuler, an animal painter, the 31-panel panorama travels from Arctic ice to Bengal tropics, grazing cows in Swiss highlands to distant wildfires in Canadian forests. “It is nice to think you could be in one room and visit the world,” says Francis. “You couldn’t get on a jet and go to India, so this was a way of bringing the world to you.”
Anatomy of a Restoration
The survival of these panels is part mystery, part design miracle. Zuber manufactured Les Zones Terrestres until 1939, when the Nazis occupied Alsace, home to the company’s factory. It’s believed that German soldiers burned the woodblocks for firewood. As a result, few complete sets remain. For Zuber, the last firm still making scenic, rare wallpaper by hand from 19th-century woodblocks, the loss was acute. According to Christie’s, where a similar set was auctioned in 2003, Les Zones Terrestres was “by far the most detailed and elaborate scenic wallpaper ever designed and printed by the firm.”
The Mellons’ set arrived in a fragile state: tears, losses, water staining. Accordingly, the partners traveled to Paris to study an early-20th-century example of Les Zones Terrestres at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. “The whole point is to restore these in a manner that looks original,” says Nalewaja, who has worked as a master paperhanger for thirty years.
Back in New York, Brittany Burggraff, a restoration artist and member of the Scenic Wallpaper team, did the slow work of stabilizing the paper with muslin and liner, correcting the staining, matching the colors, and in-painting details. The team mounted each panel—measuring approximately 21 inches wide and about 84 inches high—onto archival boards and trimmed the edges with blue ribbon sourced in Japan.
Three months later, the restoration is nearly complete and ready to be returned to the Mellon family, who will decide on final placement. For Francis and Nalewaja, the project represents a thread connecting the past to the present.
“I feel like we've been able to save these [panels] for history and make sure that they survive for the next generation,” says Francis. “That's really what it's about."
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