Her Wallpapers Adorn the Walls from North Cape to Sicily, from England to China
When looking at Elsa Krogh’s wallpaper books one would want to buy a castle and paper every single room with different wallpapers. Choose a dramatic red colour for the fireplace room, a dark blue with a golden pattern for the banquet hall, a green pattern with hummingbirds for one of the children’s rooms and one of the subtle designs for the living room where the yellow sofa is going to stand.
Elsa Krogh has created wallpapers for almost every taste and for every use. – At one time the assignment was: Make a wallpaper that can be sold south of Hamburg, and the next time the vendors needed a design that would appeal to us here in Scandinavia. She also had to incorporate consumers in the East as her audience, and every single time she created a product that she could vouch for.
– I have never shipped anything I do not like, she says, and maybe that explains why eventually not only those “South of Hamburg” bought the wallpaper. Virtually everything she created ended up on walls from the North Cape to Sicily, from England to China.
Elsa Krogh took a detour into the world of design – via a few home furnishing stores, where she sold someone else’s design – and that made her want to go into production herself, gain influence, develop quality items and enable people to live in beautiful surroundings.
She heard about the programme at Kolding School of Arts and Crafts and requested leave from her job for the three days the entrance examination lasted. Her boss said: “Don’t do that. There is no money in that. Stay here and I’ll give you a raise.” - But I was not interested in a raise. I wanted to be a designer, and that was what I became.
I was lucky that one of our guest lecturers was Head of Design at the company Nordisk Tekstil, and she offered me a job immediately after seeing the graduation exhibition. I started the day after the exhibition ended, and stayed there for five very educational years before I got the job as a designer at the wallpaper factory Fiona in Faaborg. This is where I spent my working life until I took early retirement in 2013, when Fiona closed.
Wallpaper design turned out to be very demanding. – It is much easier to get a good result with textiles than with wallpaper. Textiles are in motion – in the case of wallpaper there is nothing that distracts and can hide the flaws. And I quickly learned that the simpler a wallpaper is the harder it is to design. It is much easier to make a wallpaper with many shapes and figures than one with just a few: A figure that is placed in the wrong spot can destroy an entire wall.
It was not only design Elsa Krogh felt passionate about. It was important for her to incorporate the whole picture, to be familiar with the work of the engineers in the process, the details of the printing technique and the choice of materials in order to get an outstanding end product. Therefore you could often find her on the production premises where she collected input and gained insight into the processes. – It was the right thing to be so close to the production, and even though the workers balked when I said, for the third time: “That colour is not quite right”, they ended up agreeing with me when we hit the spot the fourth time around.
In the actual design process my inspiration came first and foremost from nature. It could be the structure and the play of colours in a rock, the vein structure in a piece of wood, a flower or something else entirely. And in the archives I found Fiona’s over 100 year-old wallpaper books which inspired the modern productions.
– When people ask me what one has to know as a designer, I’d say: You have to focus on objectives and on target groups, keep control over your commitment and have an understanding of production techniques. You have to have a sense of form and of colour, an interest in and knowledge of the potential for sales and marketing, you have to follow trends and in general have a finger on the pulse and be an inquisitive person.
