Photo by Judy Fox Interiors, Inc.

When Gwyneth Paltrow plasters nearly every room of her gorgeously appointed Hamptons home with wallpaper – as she did this summer – you know a trend is born.

Or reborn, as it were in the case of wallpaper, which enjoyed celebrity status in the late ’80s and early ’90s but quickly became the scourge of the interior design world, especially out West. Just mention the word and some local decorators still wrinkle their noses and say, “wallpaper?”

Yes, wallpaper. It’s back and better than ever. Better colors, better textures, better patterns and even better application (and most importantly de-application) methods. So even if you just peeled off the last remnant of paper from your bathroom wall in an attempt to modernize, read on, and you may decide to put it back up.

“It’s probably just as popular as it was 10 to 15 years ago,” says Tammy Sparks, a longtime wallpaper specialist at the Frazee Paint & Wallpaper Scottsdale Design Center. “The trade magazines are really pushing wallpaper. I think a lot of it is people realize you can get a lot more styles out of wallpaper than you can just with paint.”

Sparks sold wallpaper at JCPenney back in the 1980s, when virtually every department store devoted sizeable floor space to the product. Remember those giant display cases, row after row of samples, just like today’s paint aisle?

Soon, big-box home improvement stores started selling it, putting most specialty retailers out of business. Then the big guys, including JCPenney, decided it wasn’t a profitable item and stopped carrying it.

Western tastes were changing, and new architecture seemed to favor painted accent walls and faux finishes. Arizona homebuilders added texture right to the wall, making it more difficult and costly to sand it down and apply paper. The paper manufactures gave up and moved to the East Coast, where walls are flat and people traditional.

The fashion industry is largely to thank (or blame) for wallpaper’s current resurgence, says Angela Riccobono, a freelance interior decorator and clothing designer in Phoenix.

“The ’80s wave is coming back,” she says. “It’s the turn of the century. People want new, nice things. People are just looking for something new, and the styles are changing in fashion, high fashion and interior design.”

Everything old is new again. But “it definitely has a 21st-century twist on it,” she adds.

It’s no lie that wallpaper truly is different – and better – today.

Gone are the “cutesy” patterns and cold colors, Sparks says. Modern wallpaper mimics colors and textures of the earth.

“Wallpaper used to be hard and cold. Now, it is absolutely warm and stunning,” she says. “There are vinyls that look like grasscroft. It’s going more natural.”

Rich earth tones such as blue, green, brown and rust are in. So are textures and metallics, which can make paper look more like an expensive fabric, says Nancy Petrenka of Judy Fox Interiors in Old Town Scottsdale.

She’s seen wallpaper that even looks like embroidery. Her favorites include papers with mica chips and other stones, which catch the light and add another dimension to the room.