Willa Cather's Wallpaper Ornament

While it is our official 2023 National Willa Cather Center ornament, it doesn't have to be the holidays to enjoy this beautiful and decorative porcelain delight! It is packaged in a sturdy and decorative box—perfect for giving. Collect all of our Willa Wallpaper products!

Willa Cather chose this rose-patterned wallpaper for her attic bedroom at Dr. Henry Cook’s drugstore where she worked as a teenager. In The Song of the Lark, Cather described the papered room as “a sunny cave, with roses running all over the roof" and years later referenced it as her "rose-bower" in a letter to her brother Roscoe. The precious and original late nineteenth century Victoria floral paper still adorns the cozy attic space where Cather wrote, dreamt, and imagined in a room all her own. 

The Willa Cather Childhood Home, a National Historic Landmark, was fully restored in 2022-23 and reopened for guided tours on Willa Cather's 150th birthday on December 7, 2023. The last phase of this important project is the conservation of the original wallpaper in March-April 2024 by a team from the Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Purchases of our wallpaper-inspired products help benefit the conservation of the original "rose-bower" wallpaper in Willa Cather's attic bedroom at the Willa Cather Childhood Home.