Grasscloth

Grasscloth

John Ashbery covered the walls in the front hall (the downstairs center hall), the main staircase, the upstairs center hall and the bay room in grasscloth, a popular late nineteenth-century wall covering that he first saw and liked on the walls of the Throop house (the home next door to his grandparents’ home in Pultneyville).  Ashbery’s grandfather’s first cousin, Paul Holling, renovated the Throop house by putting grasscloth on the walls in 1916 when he inherited the home.