Giant, wild neon flowers; conservative preppy plaids; classic ornate damask — wallpaper patterns and styles over the years are as much of an indication of fashion and what was aesthetically pleasing in a given era as clothing. But while their subtle hues or bold patterns might firmly orient a style to one decade or another (or the comeback of one decade or another…), wallpaper can tell you other things, too — about what was valued, about class strata and position or, by how it was hung and the materials used, the time period in which an interior was adorned.
When the team at Shelter Island’s historic Sylvester Manor began in earnest to conceive of a much-needed plan to preserve and refurbish the stately manor house, like any old home it wasn’t simply one project on the docket; it became many projects, each linked to the success of another.
“I think anybody who’s ever done work on a historic property understands that once you start working on one area, it’s immediately going to impact other areas,” says Julia Brennan, Sylvester Manor’s capital projects manager.
So, replacing the old windows in the lovely first floor Ladies Parlor? That meant inevitable damage to the walls that would require repair — walls that, it turns out, held treasure in plain sight.
Where the palm trees sway
While the zebra-skin rug that once adorned the floor of the Ladies Parlor in Sylvester Manor was ever the eye-catcher, it’s the glorious, transporting Zuber (pronounced zoo-BEAR) “Eldorado” wallpaper that stops you in your tracks. You might even mistake it for a hand-painted fresco or mural, so ornate and alive are the tropical flora and fauna, snow-capped mountains and flower clustered valleys, soaring spires and stately towers. Although in a way, it’s not too far off as an art form.
“They’re not hand painted. They’re hand blocked, and it’s a far more intensive process to hand block a paper than it is to hand paint a paper,” says scenic wallpaper expert Jim Francis. Hand blocking, as the name suggests, is a method of relief printing by hand, traditionally done by taking wooden blocks into which a pattern is carved, covered with ink or dye and then stamped onto fabric — or, in this case, paper meant to adorn walls.
Francis and his partner, John Nalewaja, own Scenic Wallpaper, a Manhattan-based company that specializes in the intricate restoration, repair, removal and installation of rare historic scenic wallpaper, with a keen emphasis on that of Zuber, the 200-year-old French company that still uses the original hand-carved blocks it made in 1848 to continue producing “Eldorado” and other papers in their repertoire.
Sylvester Manor director of history and heritage Donnamarie Barnes discovered important information about the property’s past through clues the wallpaper revealed.(Photo credit: Donnamarie Barnes)
“There are 1,554 blocks and 210 colors that make up ‘Eldorado’,” Francis continues, “but they don’t make the paper to order. Like, you don’t walk into Zuber and say, ‘I want to buy Eldorado!’ They take a year to make a scenic. They don’t make it to order for you.”
As a non-profit, Sylvester Manor’s staff and board have much to tend to. Not only is there the working educational farm and CSA, and the cultural and historical programming that are part and parcel to the organization, there’s the day-to-day and future stewardship of maintaining the historic aging buildings and acreage — all of which require an abundance of careful planning and tenacious fundraising.
Right now, the manor house is poised to undergo a major refresh in autumn 2025, thanks to a $3.75 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish a new Center of History and Heritage within the house, as well as federal and state grants and private donations to fix the exterior. Among the punch-list items here: replacing the windows in the Ladies Parlor. Doing so, however, would also inevitably create damage to the old plaster walls — and that’s when the Pandora’s Box of “Eldorado” sprang open.
“So, we’re on the cusp of starting the work to restore the manor house, waiting on building permits, that kind of thing. We have architects, we’re going to be working with contractors,” says Donnamarie Barnes, Sylvester Manor’s director of history and heritage. “And the question of the Zuber wallpaper became kind of paramount.” It led them to Francis and Nalewaja, who provided not just solutions, but answers to questions they didn’t know they had.
Viva la Victorians
Barnes and the rest of the team had long held the belief that “Eldorado” had been put in place in the 1880s, the height of the buttoned-up Victorian Era — something the paper itself seemed to offer clear clues toward.
“We had based [the time period] on family oral history, and always told the story that we thought the wallpaper had been installed by members of the Horsford family sometime in the 1880s,” says Barnes. “That was our narrative and part of our tour description.”
And of course, that tracked with the style of imagery on the scenic paper.
Jim Francis and John Nalewaja, owners at Scenic Wallpaper based in Manhattan, specialize in wallpaper restoration and are very familiar with Zuber, the French company that still uses hand blocking to produce “Eldorado.” (Photos by Donnamarie Barnes)
“In Victorian times, it was not fashionable to have figures, any people, depicted,” says Francis. “They had conservatories. They loved lush palm trees and gardens and they had glass houses attached to their mansions. That’s the taste that this is reflecting.”
The Victorians also valued travel, so depicting far-flung places on their walls via high-end, hand-blocked wallpaper was as chic as you could get. “It’s a very sophisticated look; it’s not a country house look and that’s an interesting thing here,” says Francis. “They were very sophisticated, worldly people that put this in [at the manor house].”
But they weren’t quite full-fledged Victorians. In 25 years of deep-diving into scenic historical wallpaper, Francis and Nalewaja could tell by the way the paper had been hung that it had gone up in the early 20th century.
“The house, in its infinite wisdom, revealed the proof. We turned up a remnant of the paper in the attic as we were clearing things out,” says Barnes. “On the back it was stamped Paris 1901, which totally corresponded to exactly what Jim and John had said. The house gives up its secrets at the appropriate time.”
Helping history along
Long before there was a manor house, there were the Manhassets, the Native Americans who lived freely on Shelter Island until the 1600s, when European settlers showed up and began treating the tiny “island sheltered by islands” (the translation of the Manhassets’ “Manhansack-aha-quash-awamock”) and its inhabitants like baseball cards to be awarded and traded. It eventually wound up in the possession of a Triangle Trade-engaged sugar merchant named Nathaniel Sylvester, who, along with some business partners, bought the island in 1651 as a provisioning plantation. In 1652, he built a home there for his family, eventually taking full possession of the island when his partners preceded him in death years later.
By 1737, Sylvester’s grandson, Brinley, built a new manor house for his family, done in the fashionable Early Georgian architectural style, and it’s this house that stands today as the center of the 236 acres that make up Sylvester Manor. It is also here that nine generations of the family lived (along with people they’d enslaved until 1820, seven years before that practice was outlawed in New York State). In 2014, the 10th and 11th generational descendants of Sylvester established the land and all its buildings as the non-profit historical and educational center it is today.
Inside the Ladies Parlor at Sylvester Manor circa turn of the last century. (Photos by Donnamarie Barnes)
It was two ambitious sisters and descendants of Sylvester, Cornelia and Katherine Horsford, who’d extended the eastern portion of the house in 1908, and also turned what was their father’s study in the original house into the Ladies Parlor and, on a trip to France in 1905, fell in love with and purchased the “Eldorado” paper for future use. Unfortunately, though, their continental sophistication didn’t include ensuring that the paper was installed correctly.
“They just hung it over the old Victorian paper. All the plaster was disintegrating behind it, and some of it actually impregnated the paper itself, so it destroyed the paper,” says Nalewaja.
But while they couldn’t save the paper for restoration, a surprise bit of luck in preserving the pieces presented itself, perhaps due to lucky timing (or maybe the spirit of the sisters providing help for their beloved French wallpaper from beyond the grave).
“What really proved to be so fortuitous, and I think it had to do with the timing, is that [John and Jim] came in November,” says Brennan. “After a very long drought here, all of a sudden it just rained and rained and rained. Everything was moist and the wallpaper popped right off the walls in whole sheets, with very little [new] damage.”
A return to paradise
The next steps have been carefully folded into the restoration and renovation plans. Sylvester Manor applied for and won a grant from the Versailles Foundation, affording the opportunity for Francis and Nalewaja to remove the old “Eldorado” and create preserved panels that will eventually be on display at the manor house.
“It’s not in very good condition at all, but we took it all off and we saved it,” says Francis.
The grant, along with some additional private donations, also allotted funds to purchase an entire new set of the rare paper, which Nalewaja and Francis procured directly from Zuber. This set, too, is made using the original hand-carved blocks that were employed to create the paper the Horsford sisters bought back in 1905.
Zuber’s “Eldorado” wallpaper represents the Victorian ideal of travel, depicting far-flung places not easily accessed at the time. (Photos by Donnamarie Barnes)
“They’ve done multiple jobs relating to ‘Eldorado’ and they’ve worked with this particular set in multiple locations under all kinds of conditions,” says Brennan. “Once we found [John and Jim], and once they came to see it, we knew we were in really good hands.”
There’s still quite a road to travel before arriving back in the tropical climes of “Eldorado.” Permits to procure, materials to be purchased, discussions to be had, decisions to be made, more funds to raise. Nalewaja and Francis probably won’t get the greenlight to put the paper up — correctly, this time — for about two or three years. But so far, patience has paid off well in uncovering the clues of the past and securing a clear-eyed future for the historic manor.
“We keep finding this information about all these different layers of history of this place. I mean, yes, we’re talking about the Ladies Parlor and all that signifies, on top of all the other history imbued in the house,” says Barnes. “It’s a complicated history. We have a cast of descendant characters of Nathaniel Sylvester, the histories of the enslaved people, the indigenous people. And all of these stories weave together within this one single house and property.”
