Dining Room Is Brightened and Warmed at the Same Time

Before. Walls are primed and ready for paper.

After

The homeowner raved about how the wallpaper made the room look so much brighter. And it coordinates so nicely with the color of the woodwork and wainscoting.

Detail. There is a slight raised-ink feel.

Using my laser level to get the first strip plumb, and the motifs centered vertically between the windows.

The pattern name “Kashmira” reflects the slight ethnic feel of this pattern. The manufacturer is Baker Lifestyle, in their Echo Collection.

Here’s a dining room in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston that feels both cheerful and snug at the same time.

The material was “non-woven” and could be hung using the paste-the-wall method. However, I prefer the flexibility and accuracy that comes with pasting the paper.

The interior designer is Stacie Cokinos of Cokinos Design, who works mostly in the Heights area of Houston.

Bringing Fresh Life to a Heights Dining Room

This is the same house as in yesterday’s post, and I love the way the papers in the two near-by rooms coordinate in theme and color.

Note how the light blue color is just enough to make the beautiful millwork / moldings in this room stand out.

A geometric pattern in this dining room was more than a bit of a challenge. The wainscoting ran to slightly different heights as it went around the room. The ceiling in most sections was pretty level – but on the right side of the east wall, the crown molding ran up, and then back down again.

All of this means that the design motifs were not going to line up perfectly all the way around the room.

Even though the eye sees the pattern at the level of the chair rail most prominently, I chose to position the motifs so they hit the top of the wall with their tops intact. This meant that the bottom of the motifs were cut off when they reached the chair rail.

This ended up being a good decision, because, as already mentioned, the varying heights of the chair rail meant that the motifs would land on it at different points, anyway. Also, since so much of the room was comprised of the 5″ high areas over the doors and windows, I felt it more important to keep the motifs intact at the ceiling line.

That worked fine most of the way around the room. Except for that east wall, where the crown molding rose and dipped. The wainscoting also got off-level here. That is the second photo above.

I ended up with motifs that tracked up and down from the two moldings. That meant that the motifs became taller or shorter, or had more or less space between them and the moldings than the rest of the room. This would have been acceptable, because the homeowner was well aware of the home’s framing issues.

But I pulled a few tricks out of my hat to camouflage this. I took scrap wallpaper and cut out around the design motifs, to make them the correct shape and height to match others around the room, and appliquéd them on top of the skewed motifs.

No photos of this process, sorry. But you can see in the second photo that the motifs look whole and uniform all the way across the wall.

This wallpaper is by Baker Lifestyle. It is a sturdy non-woven material. It can be hung by paste-the-wall, but I prefer to paste the paper. The home is in the Heights neighborhood of Houston.