We’re all familiar with the works of beloved children’s author Roald Dahl. One of his most famous works, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, has twice been adapted for the big screen, first in 1971 with the iconic Gene Wilder, then again in 2005 with the brilliant Johnny Depp.
No matter which is your favourite (Wilder all the way for me!), we can all agree that there are some things Dahl came up with that captured our imaginations: the Oompa Loompas from Loompa Land, the river of chocolate running through the factory, and our favourite here at WallpaperInk, the flavoured, lickable wallpaper.
“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
Obviously when Dahl wrote this book it was intended for children, and it was full of weird and wonderful inventions that could never have been dreamed of by anyone else.
I mean, it’s not like they could actually make real flavoured wallpaper…could they?
They could. And they have!
In April of last year, a communications company based in London teamed up with a group of food technicians and artists to create the world’s first lickable wallpaper. Curated by McVities, the team put 1325 Jaffa Cakes on the walls of a lift in the company’s building so that workers could have a taste on their way up or down.
In an interview with marketing magazine The Drum, Senior Brand Manager for Jaffa Cakes Phillipa Tilley said, “we are all about bringing a bit more fun to life and this was the perfect way to get a little joy straight to stressed out office workers.”
And that’s not all. Normally this sort of news would have us so excited that we’d need to stop for a moment and go for a lie down, but while we were researching we found all sorts of brilliant, wonderful, and sometimes just downright crazy wallpaper ideas that got us so worked up we just had to share them with you. Here’s just some of our favourites:
1. ‘Touch-me’ wallpaper
In 2003, artist Zane Berzina created the ‘Touch-me’ wallpaper, which uses thermochromic ink that changes colour depending on the heat. This allows people to press hand prints and patterns onto the wall that stay there until the wall reaches room temperature again.
2. Wall Therapy
The Walltherapy project started in 2003 in an attempt to blend art and design with neuroscience. The idea was to create a paint-by-numbers wallpaper, which guests could add to. Each guest would be prescribed a specific colour after taking a small comparative test, and then encouraged to add their colour to the appropriate section on the design.
“We anticipate that in the finished wallpaper product everyone will have been prescribed a personal colour, pattern and texture and then walltherapy will allow them to do one of two things: Either, allow them to paint the wallpaper themselves with all the therapeutic benefits painting affords or print out a wallpaper that has been specifically designed by and is essentially ‘prescribed’ for that person, couple or family who will live with it.”
3. Pixelnotes
Designed by Duncan Wilson, Pixelnotes wallpaper is actually made up of hundreds of post-it notes. Each square has four layers of adhesive paper, with each layer being a darker shade than the one above it. You can write straight onto the wall, or just peel of notes as and when you need them. Each time you do, though, the design on the wall changes. Each time you use a note, that square becomes darker and creates a different pattern, and the more you use it, the more it changes, meaning no two walls will ever be the same.
French design company 5.5 came up with this brilliantly simple idea; why not use your wallpaper to play games? They created a wordsearch wallpaper design, which is simply a huge grid of letters. You then circle around any words you find in different colours to create different patterns, allowing for a completely custom design that’s fun too. They also came up a noughts-and-crosses design, and a labyrinth wallpaper, a giant maze for you to follow, creating unique shapes as you go.
5. Heat-sensitive wallpaper
Designer Shi Yuan’s heat-sensitive wallpaper uses a special type of heat sensitive paint that emerges when it comes into contact with heat, like in the example below; the flowers appear when the radiator is turned on, then fade away when it cools. It’s probably as close to “living” wallpaper as you can get, as the design will grow and fade throughout the day, reacting to the change in temperature.
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