A cozy nook. The homeowner likes to spend time here, soaking and relaxing. And recovering from supervising high school athletic activities ! This is a 1939 4-plex in the Montrose area of Houston that was beautifully renovated into a single-family home. So this entire master suite is carved out of what was originally one 1- bedroom apartment . Note my white 2′ x 4′ sheet of plywood over the claw-foot tub , so I can safely access the wall above. The wallpaper was placed on just one accent wall , above the tile wainscoting / chair rail . During the initial Sunday afternoon consultation , both the homeowners and I felt that this pattern on all the walls of this large master bathroom would be too overpowering . So they opted for just one accent wall . The design doesn’t have a strongly noticeable secondary or vertical pattern , but I still took the time to center the most dominant feature (the pomegranates) on the tub faucet . The faucet guy , tub guy , and tile guy didn’t get everything perfectly lined up – but nobody’s even noticing. What matters is that the finished nook looks fantastic! Also of note is that, in this near-100 year old home, the wall was bowed , and it wasn’t possible for the tile to lie flat against the entire surface. So there were some areas where the grout was 1/4″ wide, and some areas where the wall actually overshot the tile, leaving no visible grout at all. So at the area where the wallpaper met up with the top of the tile and the uneven grout line, I made a fat cut , to try to disguise the uneven line. Do a Search here to see previous posts on fat cuts . This wallpaper design is by William Morris , who was a strong force during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s , in the Art Nouveau and Arts & Crafts movements . His work is having a resurgence in popularity right now. Most are more symmetrical and repetitive than this example ( Google Strawberry Thief ) , but, true to the design aesthetic , all of them involve natural elements , such as plants , flowers , fruits , birds , and animals . In this close-up shot, you can see the raised ink of this print , which gives a slight textured feel . The manufacturer is Morris & Co. Usually M&C prints on a user-friendly non-woven material . But in the last year or two I’ve come across more and more M&C that are printed on the old-fashioned, traditional, what we call a British pulp substrate . Non-wovens are strong , durable , stain-resistant , humidity – resistant , easy to install , and easy to remove when you redecorate . Pulps , on the other hand , are just the opposite . Do a Search here to see my previous posts. None of this is a deal-breaker. The installer just needs to know what he’s getting into, before taking on the project. We hunted. This particular pattern was not available by any vendor in the NW material. Maybe it’s COVID , or supply chain issues , or maybe it’s a British thing (even though many American and Canadian companies are printing the Wm Morris designs ). Couldn’t find any outfit offering Fruit in non-woven. At any rate, the paper went up beautifully, and the basic paper material will hold up well, even if the homeowner steams up the room on her long tub soaks , and the pattern is lovely in the vintage home with new tile , tub , and faucet .
To make room for a new baby, little Henry is moving from the nursery to this room. So the the grown-up furniture, the frou-frou chandelier, and the pink wallpaper have to go!He was very excited to see the new accent wall, covered with a map showing fun places to visit and the animals that inhabit them. The muted colors meld beautifully with the décor in the rest of the house. North America. Henry knows the names of many of the animals on the map.EuropeExotic lands, exotic animals. The mural pattern is called Animal World . The color is Mint .Rebel Walls is one of my favorite mural manufacturers for typical use. Their budget-friendly products can be custom-sized to fit your particular wall / room . They print on a lovely non-woven stock, which is durable and will strip off the wall easily and with minimal damage to the wall when you want to redecorate. It can be hung by pasting the paper or by pasting the wall . Today, I chose to paste the wall . The home is in the Tanglewood area of Houston . rebelwalls.com
Notice anything? No – you don’t. That’s because it’s virtually impossible to see ANYTHING in this all-black powder room. The homeowners acknowledged that this “haute design” idea was a mistake.Two walls and part of the sloped ceiling. Adorable interpretation of forest animals
Not only did this clever design and light background brighten up the space, the homeowner exclaimed how it also made the room look larger.
This is an under-the-stairs powder room in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston. Originally, everything was black – walls, woodwork, floor, ceiling. The sink / mirror wall was the exception, being covered with white tile.
What a perfect fit is this scene of whimsical animals in a forest setting, in black on white.
The wallpaper is by Marimekko, a Finnish company.It is a non-woven material made of synthetic fibers. It can be hung using the paste-the-wall method, but I prefer to paste-the-material because it makes the paper more pliable.
This young family in the West University Place neighborhood of Houston started out with another installation company that was not a good fit. They also started out with a wallpaper selection from a company that I find to be of poor quality (Hygge & West). I was honored that they let me take on the wallpaper install. AND that they listened to my suggestion to explore other manufactuers … the paper they chose is superior in quality, and is a far more charming and fitting design for their young son.
The walls originally had a light texture that I skim-floated over, then sanded smooth, and then primed with Gardz.
The new wallpaper is very similar in color to their original choice of palm leaves, so they could keep the trim and wainscot paint that had already been applied.
Whereas paper from the original manufacturer is known for curling and disappointing “pouches” at the seams, their final selection from Boras Tapeter (a Scandinavian company) is some of the most cooperative and best performing paper I have every worked with.
The seams are invisible, the material doesn’t expand (no pattern distortion or screwed up measurements) and it doesn’t shrink (no gaps at the seams). There is no booking time, so each strip can be pasted and then hung immediately. It can also be hung via the paste-the-wall method. It hugs the wall tightly and turns corners nicely. It doesn’t crease easily, as many thicker non-wovens do. When it’s time to redecorate, this non-woven material is designed to strip off the wall easily and with minimal damage to the wall. And the surface is more washable than most, making it well suited to a young child’s room.
And best of all, the “Wonderland” design, with frolicking animals and whimsical foliage, is much better suited to a child’s room than the original palm leaf option.
This wallpaper pattern is by Boras Tapeter, and was bought from my favorite source for good quality, product knowledge, expert service, and competitive price – Dorota Hartwig at Southwestern Paint on Bissonnet near Kirby. (713) 520-6262 or dorotasouthwestern@hotmail.com. She is great at helping you find just the perfect paper! Discuss your project and make an appointment before heading over to see her.
This wallpaper pattern is something like a mural, but with a little more brain-bending. It is one continuous design, with no element or motif repeating or showing up more than once in the 33′ length of each bolt.
It’s a good thing that no one was living in the house, and that furniture had not been moved in yet. Because I needed a LOT of floor space to roll out and study each bolt.
I had to compare the height of the walls and the length of each strip that I needed, to the placement of various animals in the design. This enabled me to plot where on the wall any given critter would appear, and to get as many creatures as possible on each strip, all while accommodating the homeowner’s preference for a few special ones.
I rolled the entire 33′ long bolt out on the floor, took measurements, and used blue tape to indicate the tops and bottoms of each strip. This enabled me to fiddle with various layouts and animal positions, and I could make changes if needed.
We needed 22 strips, and I was getting 5 strips out of each double roll bolt. So after I cut five strips from the first bolt, I moved on to the second bolt.
To give a more random look, I wanted the same animals (the squirrels, for instance) to be placed at different heights moving around the room. So when I started plotting my strips and cuts from the second bolt, I made sure that the creatures landed at different heights from the first bolt. That first bolt and the animals’ positions I called “A” and the second bolt and positions were “B”. I only got four strips out of the “B” bolt.
This meant that any given motif would appear at the same height on the wall only every 9th strip. This would give a pleasing, random look.
The plan was to hang all the strips taken in order from the “A” bolt first, followed by strips taken sequentially from the “B” bolt. Repeat with another “A” and another “B”, and then back to an “A” bolt again.
To be sure, I measured and marked and double-checked everything carefully before I cut anything. Then each strip was labeled … (“2A,” “4B,” etc.)
Working around the doors and windows, the room was divided into four sections. The next step was to get all those strips of paper placed in proper sequential order, standing in queue all around the room – all while figuring the center point of each of those four spaces and plotting which strips would be placed flanking the middle of that wall.
Some cool features of this pattern is that it was placed smack down the middle of the 20.5″ wide strip, which made it a lot easier to center and balance the design than if it had been placed off-center. Also, the design did not reach across any seams, so (other than plotting the height where each critter would fall) there was no pattern match. This made it a lot easier to accommodate crooked walls and un-level ceiling and wainscoting.
The dimensions of the room were also amazingly in sync with those of the wallpaper pattern. Vertically, the 82″ height of each wall / strip worked with the placement of animals on the paper, so virtually all animals were kept intact. There was only one bird who got cut in half at the wainscoting, and that happened only every 9th strip (twice in the whole room).
Horizontally the pattern worked out just as incredibly. The width of all of the walls worked out to be within an inch or two of a multiple of the width of the paper. So centering the strips / pattern on each wall resulted in a look as if the design were “framed” by the door and window moldings. Sorry, no pics.
The downside was, just by happenstance, I ended up with an extraordinary number 1″-2″ strips that had to be squeezed in. Time-consuming and PITA.
I centered the pattern on each of these four wall spaces. But that meant that the rhythm of the pattern would get screwed up as it passed over the door to the butler’s pantry, two windows, and the 12′ wide entry to the hallway.
Here again, the dimensions worked amazingly well, and so did the very accommodating pattern. In the short 10″ high areas over these doors, I was able to “fudge” the pattern by slicing strips vertically along a tree trunk, for instance, and then overlapping the two sections an inch or two, to “shrink” the strip’s width. Making an inch of width disappear from each of seven strips is barely noticeable, and maintains the rhythm that the viewer’s eye wants to see as it travels around the room. Again, sorry, no pictures.
The walls had been primed a few days before; just laying out and hanging the paper took me 12 hours.
I hung this “Indie Wood” pattern by Timorous Beasties on the top 5′ above paneled wainscoting in a new home in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston. It’s made of non-woven material, and can be hung by paste-the-wall or paste-the-paper (which was what I opted to do). Non-wovens are strong and have a high fiber-glass content. They are designed to strip off the wall easily when it’s time to redecorate. Additionally, they are dimensionally-stable – they do not expand when wet with paste. This makes it much easier to plot placement of strips and motifs.
The interior designer for this job is Stacie Cokinos of Cokinos Design.
This very cool wallpaper pattern looks almost photographic. The design has depth, and look at those eyes! – you feel like you are being drawn into the jungle.
The paper was pricy, so, to cut down on the number of rolls needed, the homeowner ran chair rail around the middle of the room, and had the paper applied to the top 5′ only. She painted the bottom an almost-black purple (it’s way darker than the photo shows), and the ceiling got the same paint, too.
The room will be finished with a sort of mosaic, three-dimensional, leaded-glass mirror – that lights up!
Tucked into a large powder room, this is a bold, gutsy look that not every home is ready for. But it’s perfectly suites to this Montrose (Houston) couple!
My second black paper in two days, I again used artist’s chalk pastels to color the edges, so the white substrate would not show at the seams. I tried different install methods, but this non-woven material worked better and had less shrinking when I pasted the wall (rather than the paper).
This is a perfect example of “If you love it, nothing else will do, so find a way to make it happen.” The homeowner saw this pattern and went nuts over it – then went nuts when she learned the price. I suggested that she search for similar patterns by other companies … but nothing grabbed her like this one. After a few months, she came back to her original choice. Eliminating the bottom portion of the room helped bring the price down.
The paper is by Witch & Watchman, and is called “Folia.” It comes in other colorways, but nothing is nearly as dramatic as this “Dark” option. Their patterns are pretty cool. I’ve hung a similar jungle-themed design, but it had cute furry animals on it in addition to the birds – with the same piercing, luring eyes. https://wallpaperlady.wordpress.com/2016/08/21/how-many-birds-in-the-forest/
A new baby will soon be welcomed into the home of this young couple in the Houston Heights neighborhood called Norhill (or Woodland Heights). Mom wanted something gender-neutral, and found this colorful and adorable shapes-and-animals-in-blocks print on line at Lulie Wallace.
This went on just one accent wall of the room, but it is tame enough that it would work OK if put on all four walls.
I skim-floated the walls first, to smooth out the light texture on them, then followed with a primer coat of Gardz.
This wallpaper is a bit atypical, because it is pre-pasted, which means it comes with a thin layer of paste on the back that you activate with water (instead of having to roll paste on the back of every strip). I do like the pre-pasted papers. I do roll a light coat of paste on the wall, to augment the manufacturer’s pre-paste.
Another dissimilarity is that the paper comes packaged in individual strips, rather than traditional rolls with several strips rolled up together.
Even more unusual is that the strips were meant to be overlapped, instead of butted together. Overlapping the seams creates a vertical ridge under the paper which is somewhat visible. You also have to have an adhesive that will stick to the acrylic coating on top of the paper.
There are some good aspects to overlapping seams. For one, this makes for a very strong bond. For another, it takes stress of drying and shrinking paper off the seam and distributes it across that 3/4″ of overlapped area. In this 80-year-old house, with it’s many layers of paint with a history of not sticking to each other, this is important, because it greatly reduces the chances of the tension on the seams causing the paint layers to come apart, which would cause gapping at the seams. See previous post.
Another positive feature about overlapping the seams, and how that worked with this particular pattern, is that, in this 1930 home, with its unlevel ceiling and floor and its greatly-out-of-plumb walls, I was able to manipulate the strips of wallpaper so that they looked straight and plumb – even though they were actually hung quite off-plumb.
This wallpaper pattern is by Lulie Wallace, and was bought on line.
I plotted the layout of this pattern to have the leopards’ heads be at the top of the wall, just under the crown molding. This worked nicely for the first three walls. But due to unplumb walls and a very unlevel ceiling, as the wallpaper strips moved from left to right across the four subsequent walls, these poor leopards got their heads got cut off.
I cut new intact heads from scrap wallpaper, and appliquéd them onto the cats’ chests. A little snipping and trimming was needed to get the various body parts to line up.
The leopards’ necks are a little shorter than when they started out. But that is much less disagreeable than half-heads. 🙂 From 9′ down on the floor, all the eye can see is that the animals’ heads are lined up perfectly under the crown molding.
Rooms for baby girls don’t have to be all about pink. Here’s a neutral-toned, animal-rich, Noah’s Ark-themed pattern that will grow with the child. This is just one accent wall, a very effective use of pattern, and economical, too.
The mother-to-be commented that the pattern was soft enough that it could go on all four walls of the room. I agreed. But I think it would look better, perhaps, if wainscoting were added at the bottom 1/3 of the wall, or a wooden chair rail and a slightly darker shade of paint at the bottom, and then have the paper on just the top 2/3 of the wall.
This wallpaper is by Andrew Martin, a British company, and was printed on a pulp stock substrate. It has no protective coating, so mom will have to be sure the little one keeps her hands off the paper. The home is in the Rice Village area of Houston.
Couples love this mural for their new baby – I’m betting it’s all over HOUZZ and Pintrest, and that’s where web surfers are finding it. This is the third time I’ve hung it, each time in a different color. The seams were much better this time, having been cut straight so there were not gaps of overlaps, and lying down better. (Search to read my previous posts.)
The mural came from Portugal, and was custom-sized to fit this accent wall in the nursery. The homeowner did the measuring, and he did a good job (as opposed to a prior install – read previous post), and the manufacturer also added a little around all the edges, to allow for trimming at the side walls, floor, and ceiling.
Now, if the homeowner had called me before he ordered that mural, I would have had him get it a little larger. The manufacturer’s guidelines allowed for a scant 1″ at the ceiling and baseboard. In a perfect world, this would be fine.
But in this room (in a beautifully renovated 1940 bungalow in the Houston Heights), the walls were not plumb, and the ceiling was not level. If I had hung the mural true-to-plumb, it would have started tracking off-kilter along the ceiling and floor lines, quickly eating up that 1″ allowance, and quite possibly ending up running out of paper at the top of the wall or at the baseboard. The same thing could happen at the corners, too. (That did happen on one of my other installs.)
Before I pasted a piece, I did a lot of measuring and plotting, to be sure I could position the mural so it would cover the entire height and width of the wall space. Much too complicated to explain. But, in a nutshell, what I did was to hang the mural off-plumb, but parallel with the un-level ceiling.
I started with the center panel, to minimize any tracking on either the left or right sides. I also made sure that the strips falling on either side of that center piece would be wide enough to reach the two wall corners, even if they hung crooked.
My strategy worked, and I ended up trimming off 1 1/4″ from the top, and 3/4″ from the bottom, on each strip. This meant that the mural was running parallel with the ceiling and floor, which was more important than being perfectly plumb. (Note: Usually you’re trimming off 2″ at both top and bottom, so today we were really cutting it close.)
Another complicating factor to this install was that, while most wallpaper widths are 20.5″, 27″, or 36,” these three mural panels were each 4′ wide. I’m 5’3″ tall, and my arm stretch is probably not a full 4,’ so handling, positioning, manipulating the pasted 9′ long strips was very difficult.
Additionally, it was important to “work clean,” because the surface is textured and it’s not easy to remove any paste that might get on the front of the wallpaper.
There’s more: My work table is 33″ wide, so pasting and booking the 48″ wide x 9′ long strips was a challenge. And the pasted strips, which I booked in accordion folds, were heavy and unwieldy.
All that mental plotting and physical gymnastics were worth it, though, because the finished mural looked fantastic, and the mom-and-dad-to-be loved it.
I have a pretty long lead time (4 months), but this couple called at the moment when another job had just postponed due to construction delays, so I had an open day and could get them done right away. That’s really good, because the baby’s coming, and the parents want to get the room furnished and decorated and ready.
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