Peeling wallpaper in an old house is basically archaeology. Every layer is a different owner, a different decade, a different set of choices.
I didn’t expect the choices to be almost identical.
This house has had two other owners in its whole life. Both of them went straight for the same drawer. Small florals. Tight geometric repeats. That dense, grandmotherly vocabulary of pattern that says home in a very specific, unironic way. Each picked something slightly more modern than what came before. But squint at them side by side, and it’s the same room every time.
Taste works like this. People think they’re updating. Fresh paper, fresh decade, move on. But they’re not choosing differently. They’re choosing the current version of what they already believed.
The house never changed its mind. It just kept getting new wallpaper.