Wallpaper in Midwest Living Magazine

Always cool to see wallpaper featured in a decorating magazine, to nudge homeowners toward using paper in their own homes. This dark jungle pattern is a dramatic transition from entry to living room.

No boring all-white walls here! Bold color and a pattern full of visual movement make this powder room a fun and energizing space. As I like to say – you can get away with a lot of drama in a small space like a powder room!

William Morris-Like Design in Woodlands Powder Room

Before. Hurricane Ida (October 2021) took their New Orleans home and everything in it, so the homeowner relocated to a north Houston suburb to be closer to family and college friends. The home is brand new, and has grey-tan walls. While the homeowner “grows” into the house, acquires furnishings, and figures out her decorating approach, she wanted at least one room prettied up.

She fell in love with this wallpaper pattern, and decided the powder room was the best place to showcase it.

Pattern centered on the sink / faucet and light fixture. It will look symmetrical and super nice when the mirror is hung.

William Morris innovated designs like this back in the 1860’s, and started the Art Nouveau and Arts & Craft movements, which carried on into the early 1900’s. I’ve hung a lot of patterns by him, and similar, in recent years, indicating an increased interest in this gorgeous, fluid, nature -centric style.

The paper has a velvety feel, and the seams were invisible. It’s non-woven material, which is very strong and designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece when you redecorate. It’s fairly water-resistant and somewhat more stain-resistant than more traditional wallpaper substrates.

Apelviken by Midbec is a Scandinavian manufacturer. Yeah…. the instructions on the flip side were a lot of fun to read through!

Interestingly, the labels listed the sequence in which the bolts were printed. Note that not all the bolts were in proper sequence. With a machine-printed product, sequence isn’t all that important because the color will print out very evenly.

The homeowner loved the new look, and said that having this one room decorated with some color and personality helped a lot to make the new house feel like a home. After the trauma she went through in recent months, it was an honor to help her new home become warm and welcoming.

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.

The Wallpaper Lady Takes a Virus Sabbatical

As of this afternoon, and after too many nights lying awake worrying about social distancing, definitions, and wondering what my vehicle is doing on the road and what I am doing out of the house, I have decided to shutter the Wallpaper Lady until this virus thing is over.

“Home maintenance” is allowed. But simple decorating is not “home maintenance,” nor is it “essential.”

I’m not worried about catching or spreading the virus, and my clients have all been fine with the 6’ rule.

But it’s a matter of complying with the mandates, and working with the community to contain this horrible plague that has popped up from out of nowhere and is ravaging the globe.

We need to take this thing seriously, and follow the rules.

Once we get the go-ahead to move about again, I will be in touch!

The Atomic Age Comes to a Small Master Bathroom

This small master bath in a newly-renovated 1935 home across from Rice University (Houston) has a black & white checkered floor and a shiny black tiled shower (no pic). The homeowner wanted to move up a couple of decades in decorating theme, and so chose this fun space-age pattern. Now the room is ready for the George Jetson family to move right in! (All the Baby Boomers know whom I’m talking about.)

The wallpaper is by Spoonflower, comes pre-pasted (water-activated), and was pretty easy to work with. The hard part was keeping all those horizontal dashes lined up, in a house with mega wonky walls due to foundation issues and to just plain old Father Time.

Peek-a-Boo Bear for New Baby Girl’s Nursery

This design is called “Surprise.” Once I got it up on the wall, I realized why – there are only two of the cute bears, and they pop out unexpectedly from behind random fan motifs. This is the wall where the crib will be placed, and the bears will cradle it nicely, while peeping down once in a while to keep an eye on the little one.

This is a good example of why you should see your pattern choices in a room-set photo, before ordering. The mother-to-be had seen a portion of the design on the company’s website, and they also sent her a 6″ x 8″ sample. Both of these led her to believe that the bears were more predominant in the design.

Another thing to note … The 6″ x 8″ sample had a much smaller scale of “fans” and bear faces than what the homeowner received. This is because the mural is custom digitally printed to order to fit the dimensions of the specific wall / room where it will hang. So stretching the pattern to fill a full wall enlarged both the fans and the faces.

Another opportunity for me to get on my soapbox … Always have the paperhanger measure and figure what size to have the mural printed, BEFORE you order. And remember to add 2″ to EACH side of the mural, to accommodate trimming and un-level ceilings / un-plumb walls.

This company normally does add a little “bleed” area. But only about one inch – to be divided between two sides. This one-half inch at the top would not have been adequate to accommodate the un-level ceiling line in this room. Good thing I advised the homeowner to add 2″ to each side.

Even so, I had to deal with the mural the way it was printed. If this had been regular wallpaper, I would have pulled the design up to where the top of the fans met with the crown molding. But the manufacturer did not place the pattern on the panels to where I could do that, so I had to drop it a little below the crown molding.

This probably worked out for the best, because the ceiling line was not level. If I had placed the fans at the top of an unlevel ceiling, they would have worked their way off-track and you would see a sloping motif line at the top of the wall.

Since the tops of the fans had to be dropped down a little, now you see a vertical column instead of a fan top. You don’t notice a small fluctuation in the height of the column, as you would if the fan tops didn’t hit the crown molding at the same spot all across the wall.

On to more simple concepts …

This product came rolled up as one long piece, which I cut into eight individual panels, each having been printed to fit the dimensions of the wall. I spread those out on the floor of the empty room, to be sure each panel matched correctly to the next one, and to get a grasp on how the pattern would span out across the wall.

After measuring the wall and the panels, I plotted where I would place my first strip. MuralsWallpaper prints on a non-woven substrate, which can be hung using the paste-the-wall method. For one accent wall with no fancy turns or cuts, this is an ideal installation method.

To keep the surface of the paper from bopping into the pasted wall, I roll each strip backwards, with the top coming off the roll first, and secure with a Dollar Store hairband. See photo.

After the wall has been pasted (taking care to use a brush to cut paste in to the edges and corners), when I am up on the ladder, I remove the hairband and let the paper unfurl. You have to take care while positioning the strip to not allow the edges to come in contact with the paste on the wall, as this could cause dark edges or staining.

This mural by MuralsWallpaper.com went up very nicely. The finished wall looked super. It is ready to welcome the newest member of the family!

I stay pretty booked up with work, and originally wasn’t able to get this room done before the baby came. But I had a schedule change, and was able to move this job up, so the young family could get their nursery decorated in plenty of time for the baby.

I’ll bet they spend tomorrow assembling the crib and arranging other accessories for the room!

My Wallpaper on Upcoming Local Home Tours

Are you a Home Tour Junkie? I am! I attend all the home tours I can in the Houston area. This year I am thrilled to say that two of the homes where I hung wallpaper will be on the Heights Home Tour in April. And another home I worked in will be on the Woodland Heights Home Tour in March. Two homes were pulled together by interior designers – Stacie Cokinos in the Woodland Heights and Rachel Goetz in the Heights.

As a side note, a home on the Good Brick tour last year featured a room I hung wallpaper in, and a few years back some of my work was shown on the Garden Oaks Home Tour.

Forget the past stuff – come on out to the Heights and the Woodland Height Home Tours and see some lovely homes, some cutting edge decorating, and some really craftsmanly-hung wallpaper!

Silvery Grasscloth on Bookshelf Backs

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This homeowner has a wonderful knack for decorating, and her front sitting room in a newish home in the Rice University area of Houston is beautiful. But she wanted to add a little “oomph.”

This grasscloth did the trick. The natural material adds texture, and the silvery backing adds a little glamor without overpowering the rest of the room. And it’s a lovely background for the decorative items on the shelves.

British Love for a Montrose Powder Room

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This couple lived in England for a while, and adopted British taste in decorating. I have papered four rooms for them so far (another is coming up!), and (almost) all have been done in imported British wallpaper, with traditional designs.

This pattern is by Colfax & Fowler (called “Dalancey”), and is on what we call a pulp substrate. It is a beautiful, matt finish, lies very flat to the wall, and will resist curling under humid conditions. It has no protective coating, so can be stained by splashing of water or toiletries or even hands, and painter’s tape will lift the inked layer right off the backing. In other words – beautiful to look at, but handle with care. 🙂

This home is brand new, but presented challenges due to unplumb walls, bowed walls, and crooked corners. I had to do a lot of twisting and finagling, and a little patchin’ in, and some fudging with the pattern match, but the end result looked fantastic. The homeowner said, “I can’t believe how much it changes the room!”

And she said, “Every time you come, you leave our home looking a little more beautiful!”

Fabulous Jolt of Color in a Little Girl’s Bedroom

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The homeowner was originally looking at doing one accent wall behind the bed, and was loving a contemporary design with sort of concentric wavy-edged circles in a rhythmic pattern, by a high-end manufacturer that is known for printing defects, and that was crazy expensive and had a 65″ pattern repeat (lots of waste).

Over time, she looked at the room differently, and did an about-face, ending up having block paneling installed on the lower 1/3 of the walls, and then papering all four walls with a classic trellis pattern in a bold and contemporary color.

Unlike the original choice with the wavy circles, this trellis design has been around for hundreds of years and will not go out of style. The strong turquoise color stands out brilliantly against the white paneled wainscoting, so the room looks crisp and fresh for its young inhabitant, a six year old girl. The décor will be pumped up even more with the addition of a few jolts of bright coral – a vase, a throw pillow, and – most daringly – the chandelier.

Although this room presented challenges (unplumb walls coupled with an unforgiving geometric design, plus two windows with crooked edges and dimensions out of sync with those of the wallpaper), it was a fun install. A lot of plotting and brainwork was required to get that geometric pattern to look straight against those unplumb walls.

The 4th photo shows the kill point – the point where the last strip of wallpaper comes back around to meet the first strip. This almost always ends up in a mis-match. This corner did mis-match, but I had a lot of fun fiddling around to make it look like it matched.

Most men don’t care too much about decorating, but this father was really excited about the transformation of his daughter’s room.

This wallpaper pattern is called Downing Gate, and is by Thibaut Designs, and was bought below retail price from Dorota Hartwig at Southwestern Paint on Bissonnet near Kirby. Dorota was also able to get the paper shipped here super fast, so the homeowner could keep her original installation date. (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.