Wallpaper in American Farmhouse Style Magazine

Nature / woodland pattern that invites you to venture down a cool forest path. The dark color is a welcome respite from the all-white theme in most farm house décor. Putting it just above the wainscoting / chair rail keeps the color and pattern from being overwhelming.

A sweet background for kitchen shelves. This is actually wrapping paper – if you DIY, perhaps it’s an economical alternative to real wallpaper.

Adorable and appropriate for a kitchen wall.

Brick patterned wallpaper as a textured alternative to the expected ship-lap wood in many farmhouse settings.

This is from the June / July 2021 issue of American Farmhouse Style magazine.

It’s so great to see how wallpaper can add a boost to this popular style of decorating.

Realistic, Textured Faux Brick Wallpaper Accent Wall

Textured wall skim-floated smooth, primed, and ready for wallpaper.

Starting in center to balance off-level ceiling line.

Pretty realistic!

The material has a slight texture, although it’s not visible in this photo.

Originally, the homeowner, a single guy in the Houston Heights, had a sort of Asian theme in his master bedroom. But he was ready for something more guttural and free form. Mission accomplished!

The new look is a little bit Industrial Modern, and a little Back Alley. 🙂

He has a lot of sports memorabilia, and I think that would look great hung on this faux brick wall.

The ceiling line was not level at all, which means that you can expect the bricks to not line up perfectly straight across the wall at the ceiling. Bricks would be taller on one end and cut shorter at the other end.

And so I started hanging in the middle of the wall, butting my strip up against a plumb line from my laser level. Moving across the wall, as the ceiling line starts to track up or down, by starting in the middle, you even out any wobbling of the pattern at the ceiling by spreading half of it on the right side of the wall and half at the left side.

As it turned out, the bricks stayed perfectly straight across the ceiling line.

This is a lightly textured, embossed vinyl product by Akea, a British company. I was really expecting a non-woven paste-the-wall substrate. But this was on a paper backing, which you don’t see often these days, especially with the European manufacturers.

It was thin and flexible, the seams laid down nicely, and no bubbling (bubbles are pretty typical with paper-backed vinyl goods).

Green Leaf Pattern in 1930’s Home

I adore this home – a cute, yellow-brick bungalow directly across from Rice University (Houston). It has been updated, yet kept mostly authentic to its 1930’s roots. I papered several rooms in the main house a few months ago, and was back today to paper the bathroom in the garage apartment.

Originally, the homeowner wanted wallpaper from Hannah’s Treasurers, which would be the real-deal old wallpaper from the 1930’s or 1940’s. https://hannahstreasures.com/ But for various reasons, she ended up choosing this more modern, yet timeless, pattern of ginger foliage. One deciding factor was that the colors coordinate perfectly with the green subway tile in the shower.

The wallpaper has a vinyl surface (resistant to water splashes and light stains) on a non-woven backing (much superior to the paper backing used on lower-end pre-pasted vinyls – read more on my page at the right). It was nice to work with, and should hold up well over many years.

The wallpaper is by York, in their designer line by Antonina Vella. It was purchased from Southwestern Paint on Bissonnet near the Rice Village.

Soft Pink Envelopes a Little Girl’s Room

I hung pink wallpaper in this little girl’s room and bathroom in the family’s Houston home a year or two ago, and they asked me to bring some more pink sweetness to the girl’s room in their country home outside of Chappell Hill, Texas.

This design is called “Yukutori” and is by Farrow & Ball. While a stronger design would work well on a single accent wall, this is a good pattern for putting on all four walls, because it’s soft and receding, and will be a good backdrop without stealing attention from furniture and artwork.

The slight orange-y tinge to the color works well with the red brick fireplace and chimney.

This paper is by Farrow & Ball, a British company.

I am disappointed in the quality of their paper, especially for the price the homeowners paid. I’ll talk more about this in later posts, which will include photos.

For now, enjoy the sweet look of this little girl’s bedroom in the country.

Timorous Beasties, Papillion de Nuit

Say it in French and it sounds beautifully exotic. In reality, they’re moths.

This rhythmic pattern by Timorous Beasties went in a powder room in a new home in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston. Note the brick and wooden accents in the room.

Whereas most wallpaper patterns repeat either every strip or every other strip (half-drop), Papillion de Nuit has a quarter-drop pattern match, which means that the pattern repeats itself every fourth strip. It’s extremely difficult to figure out and to keep properly placed on the wall, especially when every motif is identical.

In addition, the powder room had some challenging features of its own. The whole job took me about 14 hours! It looks great, though.

It’s made of fiberglass-based non-woven material. This can be installed via the paste-the-wall method, or by pasting the paper (which is what I generally do). Some features of this material is that it is designed to be stripped off the wall easily when it’s time to redecorate, and that it is dimensionally-stable and won’t expand or stretch when wetted by the paste.

The interior designer for this job is Stacie Cokinos of Cokinos Design.

Books and Bricks

This room in a 1920’s home in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston is to become something of a “man cave,” hence the dark wood floors and the rich, cobalt blue of the bookcases. The bookcases needed a little more personality, so the interior designer found this beautiful faux brick wallpaper pattern – amazingly in the exact perfect blue hue to match the paint.

The paper is by Wallquest, one of my favorite brands, and was lovely to work with. It’s one of the most realistic faux brick patterns I’ve come across, and does not have the repetitiveness that many patterns so.

The interior designer for this job is Stacie Cokinos, of Cokinos Design. Stacie specializes in new construction and whole-house renovations, mostly in the Heights neighborhoods. I can’t say enough good things about her designs and about working with her. https://www.cokinosdesign.com/

Fireworks or Dandelion Heads ??

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No matter if you see fireworks or flowers, this light colored pattern full of bursts of movement really transformed this powder room. Originally, the room was papered a dark brick red color. It was so dark that I could not even get a photo, plus the paper had no pattern, so you have to wonder why they didn’t paint instead.

The homeowner searched hard to find a wallpaper that would coordinate with both her new grey granite countertop and the existing Saltillo tile floor, while brightening up a room that had been cave-like for decades.

I would say that she was successful, because this paper fills the bill in every way.

This home is in the Fondren Southwest neighborhood of Houston. The wallpaper is by York, in their Candice Olson line. The label said it was unpasted, but it turned out to be pre-pasted. I pasted the paper anyway, and was very happy with the quality of the paper, and how nice it was to work with, and how tight the seams were, as well as the overall finished job.

Wallpaper – From Pastoral Toile to Jailhouse Brick

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This powder room started out with a classic French toile in yellow-on-red, on all four walls. It was a popular look – for the mid-Century. The homeowner wanted something both updated and rustic, with a little texture tossed into the mix.

I love the shot of the two patterns next to each other, with the new brick slowly eating up the tired, outdated French toile.

This paper came as a sort of a mural, with three 9’10” panels per bolt. It was intended to not be repetitive, so it had a long pattern repeat and a multiple-drop pattern match. (MDPMs are way too complicated to discuss here.) The look is attractive, because it minimizes the repetitiveness of a design popping up in the same place on every strip. On the other hand, MDPMs are the Devil to figure out, and they eat up a lot of paper, too.

Some of the photos show off the realistic pattern and feelable texture. To be honest, I really liked the product. Well, at least while I was working with the first bolt. It stuck nicely to the wall, turned corners tightly, and the seams were all but invisible. The rustic b5rick pattern looks super behind the dark oil-rubbed-bronze light fixture and faucets.

Then I needed to open a new bolt of paper for my next strips. The packages were not marked as to run or batch numbers. Interestingly enough, there was a slight color difference between “Bolt A” and “Bolt B.” Surprisingly, the color difference was not easy to spot, once the paper was on the wall.

Even with careful packaging, there had been damage to some of the edges of the wallpaper. Besides the banged edges, and paper backing showing white at the edges so I had to take an oil pastel artist’s material to color the edges of each strp. In addition, there was a tad bit of curl in the vinyl at the edges of the bolts of wallpaper. What this translates to is, many of the seams in the room did not lie down as tight and flat to the wall as I would have liked. See photos. I would have been happier with tighter seam joins, but the homeowners thought it all looked lovely.

This wallpaper pattern is by Debbie McKeegan for Digetix, a British company, and was bought on-line directly from England.

Great Houston Chronicle Story About Wallpaper

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Click the link to read about modern trends in wallpaper. Click the link, and you can scroll through photos of wallpaper in room settings. I hung the diamond, stone, brick, and circle wallpapers. Pamela O’Brien of Pamela Hope Designs, is the interior designer quoted in the article, and I am privileged to work with her several times a year on wallpaper installations.

I’m a little disappointed that wallpaper is described as a “luxury item,” because, while this article mentions some really “far out there” materials (LED lights), in real life, room-transforming patterns and textures are available at reasonable costs for “average” people in “everyday” homes.

If you’re getting the itch for how wallpaper can personalize and transform your home, send me an e-mail to wallpaperlady@att.net

Birds! Pen-and-Ink and Watercolor

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Here is wallpaper pattern that is subtle, whimsical, and colorful all at the same time. It looks like a pen-and-ink drawing of trees, with birds filled in in watercolor. Positively beautiful!

I hung this on an accent wall in the dining room of a very nicely updated 1930 brick bungalow in the Norhill district of the Heights neighborhood of Houston. The paper was a non-woven material, and was a paste-the-wall installation process, and was nice to work with. The manufacturer is Holden.