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Bruce Bradbury established Bradbury & Bradbury Art Wallpapers in 1979. Fascinated by Victorian architecture in his youth, Bruce moved to San Francisco in the late 1960s. He later traveled to England where he explored the wallpaper collections at the Victorian & Albert Museum in London and left enchanted by the work of William Morris (1834–96), Christopher Dresser (1834–1904), and other Victorian-era designers. Bruce returned home and taught himself to silkscreen while working at wallpaper factories in Benicia and San Francisco. Before long, he began crafting his own Victorian wallpapers in the evenings and weekends at the studio in Benicia and established a mail-order business. The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 sparked an impetus to save historic buildings and homes threatened by urban decay and redevelopment. Preservation legislation grew further in the 1970s, encouraging fledgling homeowners to restore Victorian homes in San Francisco and other cities across the country. Bradbury & Bradbury Art Wallpapers appeared at the perfect time. In 1979, their first catalog featured twelve hand-silkscreened period wallpapers. In 1981, Bruce moved into the studio where Bradbury & Bradbury Art Wallpapers still resides today, a nineteenth-century former U.S. Army arsenal in Benicia, California. See “The Victorian Papered Wall” is now on display pre-security in the International Terminal. https://bit.ly/VictorianPaperedWall
This image was posted on November 17, 2021.