"18th C wallpaper in America? 28mm Dollhouse furniture?" Topic

Let's suppose you have a "nice" house by the standards of 1775 Lexington or Concord. A nice comfy saltbox.
How would you decorate your interior walls?
Yes, this is vital for a wargaming site! Since I can now buy pretty little laser cut mdf buildings from Sarissa where the roof comes off, I will now be fighting inside, if needed. Ditto at Chew House. Or Trenton.
Gone are the days where solid stolid resin buildings had fights worked out on paper.

Would painting the walls be sufficient? Or were there actual wallpaper designs I can download and print?

And while I'm at it, is there dollhouse furniture at 1:56 or 1:60 or O gauge out there?

If you Google Georgian style interior images you should get a good look.

Paint and moldings (Crown, chair rail and wainscoting) A good deal of it is one color, sometimes two. The images match what you see in the restored period homes in the Philadelphia area.

A color palette:

link

Thanks, Don.

Note to self. These things are a lot easier to paint BEFORE you assemble the house. Don't be in such a hurry next time.

Standard dollhouse scale is 1:12. Some 1:24. A very small amount in 1:35, and that European. Oh, and another small amount in 1:6!

Try looking at 1/48th (so called quarter scale) dollshouses.

Let's suppose you have a "nice" house by the standards of 1775 Lexington or Concord. A nice comfy saltbox.
How would you decorate your interior walls?

Winston – By the mid-18C, Great Britain was the leading producer of wallpaper in Europe, but the series of wars with France from 1700-1815, export duties in peacetime, and a wallpaper tax (imposed in 1712 and not repealed until 1836) handicapped the industry. However, we are not talking about the ready-printed, "off the peg" designs that we use today. Pre-prepared wallpaper was rare and most designs were either hand-painted, or hand-blocked, onto plain paper, either just prior to, or soon after, it was hung. Quite often designs might take the form of murals depicting either historic events, or fauna and flora of exotic places. Colonial officials, such as Benjamin Chew or John Hancock, with really swanky town houses, might have commissioned wallpaper to hang in their homes (possibly even imported from England), but mostly the skills required would have been rare in North America, and certainly outside of the major cities such as New York and Philadelphia. In small villages like Lexington or Concord, it is very unlikely – unless there was a specialist artisan in the area – that any houses would have had wallpaper; mostly they would have had plain painted, plastered walls.

Thanks guys. That makes it easier. Particularly since I already have Wedgewood Green and Blue paints.

The naming conventions for scales can be very confounding.

Most dollhouse scales are similar to older articulate scales. That is how much to equal a foot. So 1/4 is 1/4 inch equals a foot, or 1/48 scale, and 1/8 is 1/8 of an inch equals a foot or 1/96 scale.

Here are some random 1/4 inch scale (1/48 or approximately the same a O gauge model railroad) sites:
auction
karencary.com
andrewsmini.com/miniatures
link
link

Dollhouse scale uses architectural conventions.

A not uncommon way to decorate painted walls was to use stencils.