Cole & Son Florencecourt in Meyerland (Houston) Powder Room

Before, primed and ready for wallpaper.

After.

I love the muted charcoal-and-cream colors with the marble vanity top. In addition, there are small brown flecks here and there, which help tie it to the floor tiles and the burnished gold mirror.

The pattern has a slight “raised ink” texture – hard to see here, but lovely in person.

This is a non-woven material. It can be hung with the paste-the-wall method, but I wanted the flexibility created by pasting the paper.

Cole and Son is a British company. Most everything they make is very nice.

Historic Hummingbirds Pattern in Home Office

“Before,” this first floor home office in a home in Bellaire (Houston) had a pretty color on the cabinets, but felt empty and blah. “After,” the dark wallpaper really sets off the cabinets, and gives the walls definition and personality.

The wallpaper also went in the area below the counter top – I wanted to take the photo before we lost daylight.

This Hummingbird pattern by Cole & Son is over 100 years old. It’s printed on a non-woven substrate, and can be hung by the paste-the-wall method or by pasting the paper (which is what I did).

David Hicks’s “Hexagon” in a Master Bathroom – Note the Freestanding Bathtub

David Hicks’s “Hexagon” pattern by Cole & Son is a well-loved design. I’ve hung it a number of times. Here it is in a large master bathroom in a very Mid-Century Modern home in the Piney Point (Villages) neighborhood of Houston.

Just this bathtub alcove, along with two small mirror walls over the his-and-hers vanities, received wallpaper.

Just the tub alcove by itself took me over six hours to hang (six single rolls). The complicating issues were unplumb walls, unlevel ceiling and soffit, a geometric pattern that the eye wants to see marching evenly across the walls, thick stiff paper that is hard to manipulate, ink that wants to crack and flake off the paper, complicated room lay-out, and … squeezing behind that tub to put wallpaper on the walls around it!

There are some spots where the pattern match is off a bit, and some areas where the crookedness of the walls is very evident (meaning that the pattern goes off-kilter). But overall, the room turned out great.

The design is called “Hexagon,” and is by David Hicks, designer for Cole & Son, a British company who has been manufacturing wallpaper for way more than a hundred years.

It’s a non-woven material that can be hung by the paste-the-wall method, but I chose to paste the paper, which made it more pliable, and which made it easier to get paste where it needed to be when going around the window areas and behind the tub.

Cole & Son Woods / Stars for a Baby Boy’s Nursery

See that top photo? This newborn baby was doomed to a boring, blaagh, unstimulating nursery. But Mom wanted more for her first-born son. Pastels and teddy bears wouldn’t do it. Mom found this innovative design in an un-baby-like color – and, boy, does it look great!

In the top photo, I am in the process of applying smoothing compound to a textured wall. Once dry, it will be sanded smooth and then primed, making it ready for wallpaper.

I hung this in a new home in the Bridgelands area of Cypress / Katy (Houston). The manufacturer is Cole & Son, a British company. It is a thick, fairly stiff non-woven material. It is intended to be installed with the paste-the-wall method, and it works nicely for single accent-wall projects like this.

But that thickness and stiffness means that it would be less suitable if it had to turn corners or meld into cuts around intricate moldings. That means it would be difficult to get to look great in rooms that have a lot of angles, edges to wrap, or detailed cuts. (bathrooms, kitchens, rooms with decorative moldings, etc.)

I don’t have a finished-room shot of this baby’s room, but, as you can see, the crib accent wall looks fantastic.

I like this matt-finish charcoal blue color much better than the more common black-on-white designs I have seen. And the gold stars really amp up the appeal.

Very Cool Wallpaper Design – Storm Clouds!

Please click the link below – I promise it’s worth it!

Every time I think I’ve seen the world’s coolest paper, I discover another on.. Here’s one that a buddy in the National Guild of Professional Paperhangers (NGPP) just installed. If you go to our Facebook page, you will see his photos of the finished room, and entryway.

It’s by the British company Cole and Son, the subject is rolling storm clouds, and it looks like an old etching, like from Dante’s Inferno.

http://www.cole-and-son.com/collection_detail.asp?CollectionID=115

For the Birds

Last week I installed a beautiful paper by a British manufacturer, Cole & Son. The paper is a reproduction of a very old pattern that dates back to Victorian times. I have done similar papers by other manufacturers based on the same design many, many times, and it’s one of my favorites – and a favorite of my clients, too, as I have installed this pattern in many colors in many homes.

Here it is in close up:
http://www.cole-and-son.com/zoom.asp?ID=62-1002
Or Google it: Cole and Son pattern code 62/1002

The room was a smallish bathroom in an older home. The barely-there soft green of the background matched the 1920’s tile perfectly, and the pattern scale was just right for the size of the room. It was gorgeous.

Until….

Until I put the paper on the ceiling.

I know that lots of designers like wallpaper on the ceiling, and I see it in a good many homes, especially in River Oaks and other neighborhoods where homeowners are more likely to work with interior designers.

But, to my personal taste, unless it’s a very subdued pattern or a special look like Bradbury & Bradbury (Google it), I just don’t like wallpaper on the ceiling.

In this case, to my eye, it really closed in the room, brought down the ceiling, and made the whole space claustrophobic. Were it my house, I would have put the paper on the walls, and left the ceiling white.

Gee, I sure hope the interior designer for that job isn’t a reader of my blog! : )

http://www.wallpaperladyhouston.com/

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