Re-creating the Dining Room

Our Dining Room, in particular, with all of its brightly cheerful windows and curved corner cove, where the walls and the ceiling meet, was dull and lacked any emotion or feeling.  The American Gothic dining room suite built by Tobey Furniture Company, a prominent 1880s Grand Rapids furniture company, looked garish and out of place against the white starkness.

This room was aching for a period look and period-appropriate materials to restore it to the grandeur of its past and the look appropriate to a “Millionaire’s Row” Main Street mansion.  We set out to first choose the materials that would have been present in this space, and re-create the look taking our cues from the history of the house itself.

Beneath the 1960s pressed-board panelling that was installed below the original chair rail, we discovered the “ghost” of Lincrusta panels that once had adorned the wainscoting of that room.  Lincrusta is a material dating back to the 1870s, use extensively as a decorative material for the next thirty years before it went out of style.  The base material is a paper mulch soaked in linseed oil.  It is then squashed flat under heavy cylinders that contain the “negative” pattern that is then pressed into the material as a “positive” or heavily embossed pattern.  At first the material is supple, but it gets significantly harder over time.  After a while the company made some changes to the formula to produce another flat-rolled material that they called Linoleum — a material still used even today.

Most of the companies that made Lincrusta went out of business years ago, but one company still produces the patterns from their original cylinders from the 1870s.  You can now buy their patterns at most wallpaper stores.  It really is a great material for old houses with plaster walls, as the material is so thick and so strong that any cracks that might appear in the plaster won’t make their way through the wall covering.  It comes in white and you paint it to suit your needs. 

Unfortunately, the Lincrusta ghost pattern we saw beneath our chair rail didn’t match any of the patterns still being made, so we opted to cover it again with a solid wood wainscoting.  For a template, we used a wainscoting pattern from one of the other houses in town that were architecturally so similar to ours that it was likely the same hand that designed them both.