” Floating ” accent wall between kitchen and dining room . The homeowners originally considered a mural for this area . But with help from the wallpaper sales guy, they landed on this. Both husband and wife love this. The black color plays beautifully off the black cabinets in the kitchen , butler’s pantry , and mud room . The gold geometric lines keep everything lively . The specs say this is is a 25″ pattern repeat. But from looking at it, you’d think it was much shorter … the narrow lines match up with the narrow lines, and the fat sections line up with fat sections. Maybe 4″ repeat. But – not. I’ve hung this before, so I was already aware that those lines and sections are not all the same distance apart. It’s essential that you lay your strips next to each other and make sure you’ve got the pattern match correct. Because if not, you could end up with tiny 1/8″ mis-matches across the seams between some of those gold lines . This is a Jaclyn Smith design by Trend . It’s a paste-the-wall / non-woven material , and is strong and durable , and resistant to stains and tears . Flexible and easy to install . Will strip off the wall easily and in one piece when you redecorate . It has a raised ink / lightly textured surface . The wallpaper was purchased from Calico / Calico Corners on W. Alabama in Houston , with the expert knowledge and interior design assistance of Ron Dillon , whom I’ve known for about 25 years . The home is in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston.
Before. Grey and boring . The built-in banquette seating has been removed.Finished.Closer look.Showing the pattern centered on the wall, and with the shutters. The dimensions of the paper not corresponding well with the width of the window, along with logistics of pattern placement at the ceiling line but starting my first strip under the window all created some plotting and engineering challenges. Fun, but time consuming. But it turned out great!The original idea was to just paper the nook area, ending at the vertical door molding. But it would have looked odd to stop the wallpaper above this doorway. So the homeowner and I decided to run the paper along the top of the doorway, and then down the left side (not shown), which dead-ends into some cabinets and the granite countertop. It looked good and was the right call.It tickles me that this is quite obviously a riff on the very popular Strawberry Thief wallpaper pattern by William Morris , which is quite popular right now (do a Search here to see my installations of it). When a company comes up with a hit, you can be assured that a competitor will soon be making its own version of it. The original has a lot more color, but this version is limited to just two colors. Even though there is a lot of contrast between the black and the white , the pattern doesn’t feel busy, because the design is so close and tight . There is a lot of symmetry , repetitiveness , and balance in Wm Morris and similar styles . I love the raised ink texture to this material . Whoops! A slight pattern mis-match . The overall design is busy enough that small imperfections like this (as well as some color variations / shading ) are not really noticeable . It’s odd to me that the printing defects are different in different strips / rolls of the wallpaper . You’d think that if the print roller was out of whack, it would create the same image every time it strikes the wallpaper surface. Or maybe it’s the trimmers that are off. If they had cut 1/16″ more off that left edge, we might have a perfect pattern match . The manufacturer is York , one of my favorites , in their Sure Strip line, also one of my favorites. It’s in the Magnolia Home collection , by, yes, Joanna Gaines , of HGTV fame with the show Fixer Upper . SureStrip is a pre-pasted , thin , flexible , non-woven material that is easy to hang . It’s also easy to remove when you’re ready to redecorate , because it’s designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece with no damage to your walls . installer houston birds
A few months ago, I papered the adjoining powder room in this same watercolor -y wallpaper pattern. Now that the homeowner’s new custom cabinetry has been installed in the laundry room, I’m papering that area, too. Here’s the before picture.The homeowner made the point that, after all the money they spent on the carpentry, everything was swallowed up by the all-white walls. Well, a little color and pattern from wallpaper changes all that! Besides being beautiful, note how the wallpaper makes the moldings and cabinets stand out. Here the roses look purple … they’re actually more navy blue in color. Close up. The design looks like real watercolor brush strokes. Note there’s a slight pattern mis-match at the seam. This is a very close-up shot. From three feet away, you don’t notice it. Tomorrow I’m hanging another room with the same pattern but from a different run … Let’s see if the pattern matches better in the new run. The pattern is by Caitlin Wilson and is in the Sure Strip line, made by York , one of my favorite manufacturers. This is a unique pre-pasted material, as it’s designed to strip off the wall easily when you redecorate. I like Sure Strip a lot. Do a Search here to read about my install techniques with these. This is a nicely renovated and updated home in the energy corridor / Memorial area of west Houston.
I hung this same paper in this same kitchen not even a year ago. A few months later, the homeowners suffered “burst pipes” from the big freeze storm that hit Houston in February 2021. Consequently, their whole kitchen had to be torn out and replaced – drywall, flooring, cabinets, electrical, plumbing, and, yes – wallpaper.
They chose to go back with the exact same pattern they had used last year.
The manufacturer is Anderson Prints, it’s a traditional paste-the-paper product, and it was purchased from Stacey at Southwestern Paint on Bissonnet.
The width of the wall space to be covered with wallpaper is about 9″ wide. Yet the strip of wallpaper is 28″ wide. Maneuvering that wide strip of paper into this narrow space is going to be difficult, it’s going to get a lot of paste slobbered on the upper and lower cabinets, and is likely to put a lot of stress on the paper, and also create creases. My solution was to cut the next strip of wallpaper in two, making the next strip (the left side of the split strip) just 10″ wide – enough to let just 1″ pass under and into the cabinet area. Then I took the appropriate pattern match section from the right half of the split strip, and placed it under the cabinet. If you look closely, you can see the seam under the left edge of the cabinets.
This little trick made hanging this strip a whole lot easier, and it greatly reduced stress on the paper and the potential for creases or damage.
The red plastic tape is on the backside of the top of the wallpaper to keep paste off the cabinets.
The top photo shows the classic savoy pattern by Waverly that I have hung so many times – in the early ’90’s. Time for an update!
The new wallpaper maintains the same navy and white colorway, but in a stronger presence and with more upward movement. I mean, what lifts your spirits better than soaring shorebirds?!
I really like the way the navy background stands out against the white woodwork. Much of this kitchen is the area above the cabinets, and the color and pattern play out very well in that short area.
This wallpaper is by Anderson Prints. It is a traditional paper, and was fairly thick, compared to most of their papers. I think the extra heft was due to the manufacturer printing on a dark substrate. This helps keep white from showing at the seams as the paper dries and shrinks a tad.
Speaking of which, I was pleased that the paper did not shrink much at all. With a dark paper, even the smallest shrinkage will allow the wall surface to peek through.
The job is an older townhome in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston. The wallpaper was bought through Southwestern Paint on Bissonnet.
Today I was priming the backs of some bar cabinets. My preferred primer, Roman’s Ultra Prime Pro 977, which usually sticks to anything, was beading up and sweating off of the Formica surface. Even if it dried, it would leave beads and bumps under the wallpaper. I had to take a paper towel and wipe it all off.
Luckily, I had some Zinsser 123 in my van. This stuff sticks to just about anything. It rolled on with no problems.
It’s OK to hang wallpaper over 123, but I prefer to hang on a product made specifically for wallpaper. So, once the 123 was dry (it dries quickly, and for good measure, I set a fan blowing on it), I rolled on a coat of Ultra Prime.
This is all very timely, because I was looking at that can of 123 just the other day, which was bought exactly a year ago and which I virtually never use, and was about to toss it out. I’m glad I kept it.
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