Why Are Wall Doodles Everywhere These Days?

Good little girls do not draw on the walls with Magic Markers. It’s a rule I knew instinctively as a child, so I only colored with pencils on crisp printer paper, even covering our wood dining table with a protective cloth. The big, blank canvas of white walls taunted me. I wanted to draw on them because they weren’t meant for drawing, though no one told me why.

Last summer, when I walked into the newly opened Lower Manhattan cafe-wine bar Casetta, that childhood drive was animated. The cream walls were marked with sporadic doodles of red flowers with curlicue stems and three-pronged masses for petals. Chains of the same scribbled perennials snaked up each blade of the ceiling fan. In the year since, I’ve seen similarly whimsical wall illustrations decorate more and more homes on social media, many of them evoking youthful imagery like simplified sketches of animals or flowers, even in spaces designed explicitly for adults.

To be clear, as long as we’ve had walls, we’ve been drawing on them. Just look to the Chauvet Cave in France, with some of the earliest known figurative rock paintings and engravings. By the Renaissance period, no half-decent chapel or palace was complete without a fresco. Many 20th-century artists used their homes as canvases for all sorts of experimental markings—British photographer and interior designer Cecil Beaton’s bathroom at his country house had stenciled and signed drawings of his guests’ hands on the walls, American painter Walter Anderson covered his Mississippi cottage with sketches of surrounding flora and fauna, and French poet and artist Jean Cocteau left his mark on his famous "tattooed villa" with charcoal-and-tempera Greek gods in almost every room.

This celebration of aesthetics typically considered childlike is nothing new in design. In the 1980s, Italian design collective the Memphis Group started making postmodern decor employing abstract shapes and primary colors that were counter to the design conventions of the time, which focused on function and favored a pared-down look. In the first decades of the millennium, minimalism reigned supreme, but the maximalist revival in recent years has ushered in a flood of trends rooted in the adult yearning for yesteryear, from the Y2K craze to "nursery chic" decor and Fischer-Price coded cookware. The current reclamation of scribbled imagery isn’t just happening on our walls—it’s the look du jour for just about every trendy bistro menu, and seems to be taking over the product marketing for everyday items we stock our homes with, too. Even the label on your olive oil bottle can look like a lunchbox note drawn for you.