Fun Hoppet Folk Wonderland Wallpaper in Powder Room of Young Family

This is a 2-room powder room in the Memorial Villages area of west Houston. The home is new and openly spacious, but has many classic elements like very elegant moldings and trim work.
I absolutely LOVE this 1890’s Victorian era marble sink with metal legs – a lucky eBay score.
The homeowner has young kids and an active family and wanted to do something ” wild ” in the powder room.

I’d say this Wonderland pattern fills the bill!

The look is especially effective due to the homeowner’s bold choice to paint the woodwork this rich mustard ochre color.

Looking from the sink room through the arched doorway into the potty room.

Cute, cute pattern! And lovely material to work with.

The glass flower light sconces are vintage, too, dating to the ’50’s or ’70’s. A similar-themed glass, floral, and brass chandelier will hang in the adjacent potty room.

This is the mirror that will go up, almost touching each light sconce on either side. The grey tones in the mirror look super good with the grey marble vanity / commode sink.

Manufacturer is Borastapeter distributed by Brewster , both fine companies. It’s a non-woven material and can be hung by the paste the wall method or by pasting the paper.
The original wallpaper came from Finest Wallpaper in Canada, a good company. But the homeowner ordered half of what was needed, and was not able to get more in time for our install date. I suggested she call Dorota at the Sherwin-Williams on University in the Rice Village (713) 529-6515) and, sure enough, she found a source that had the paper in stock and could get it here lickety-split.
This is the second time I’ve hung this paper in one week, and I’ve hung it several times previously and have it coming up again – always in this dramatic and colorful black version. People sure love the whimsy of frolicking frocked pigs!

Defects in Today’s Wallpaper

Yellow strip along right side of strip at top of photo. Grey strip just to the right of my pencil in the second photo.

Horizontal yellow stripe about center in this photo

Hard to see, but this photo shows “ghosting” of the print from the instruction sheet showing through the surface of the wallpaper. The instructions had been rolled up inside the paper. Somehow, the ink transferred onto the wallpaper. This ruined about 2′ of the bolt of wallpaper – multiplied by three bolts.

Edges splayed / curled up, probably due to a trimming glitch at the factory. In addition, several feet of this affected area had a darker color – which would have showed up as a stripe along one edge of the wallpaper.

This Candice Olson wallpaper is made by York. York is normally one of my favorite brands. But today was disappointing.

Once I discovered these printing and trimming defects, I contacted the homeowner. After kicking options around, she decided to NOT have the wallpaper hung. Why spend all that money for paper and labor, and have a less-than-stellar result?!

She will present these problems to the company. There is a good chance that she can avoid defects in the replacement paper, IF she gets them to send a different run.

Here is another reason why I am glad she purchased from a “real” wallpaper company (in this case, she bought from Burke Decor), instead of a middle-man company such as Wayfair, Etsy, Ebay, and even Amazon.

A wallpaper-focused company will be able to ferret out problems. And they will be knowledgeable of Run Numbers and etc. So the replacement they send will be free of printing and other types of defects.

This wallpaper is by York, in the Candice Olson line.

Double Rolls, Single Rolls, Too Many Rolls

This homeowner was supposed to buy 10 single rolls of wallpaper. So that’s what she ordered – 10 rolls of paper.

But what she got was 10 double rolls of wallpaper. That’s 20 single rolls – twice as much as she needed.

Each of those bolts you see in the box in the photo is a double roll. Double rolls are a good thing. It is typical (and desirable) for two single rolls of paper to be uncut and rolled together as one double roll bolt. You usually get an extra strip of paper out of a double roll bolt.

This is the traditional American way of packaging and referring to wallpaper.

But … some companies use different terminology. These would be most all of the British manufacturers, as well as some American companies who are new to the wallpaper game, and who do not manufacturer their own papers, but get them from outside sources. Some of these are Serena & Lily, Hygge & West, Anthropologie, and middle-man retailers like Amazon, eBay, Wayfair, etc.

For these companies, what most of us call a double roll, they refer to it as single roll. It’s the same amount of paper, the same sized package – it’s just referred to differently.

If you’re not savvy and knowledgeable about the terminology of single and double roll bolts, and about the various companies that use conflicting terminology, you could end up with twice as much paper as you need – or, worse yet, with only half as much as you need.

This company, Graham & Brown, is based in the U.K. Hence their single roll is what I call a double roll. The company is very large, though, and has offices here in the U.S. – so they almost seem American. My client ordered her paper on-line, instead from my favorite source (see page to the right), and so there was no human eye overseeing the single/double roll conundrum.

Bottom line – she got caught in the conundrum, and ended up with twice as much paper as needed.

This is one reason I ask my clients to run their brand and pattern selections by me before they make their purchases. That way (hopefully), I can catch snafus like this, as well as figure in factors like pattern repeat, multiple drop matches, extra-wide material, and etc.

Beautiful British Birds & Foliage in a Powder Room

Digital Image

Digital Image

Digital Image

I have hung this pattern a couple of times before, and I have to say, it is one of my all-time favorites. The idea of this pattern dates back to the 1800’s, so it is very historic and classic. It is by a British manufacturer, and one of the homeowners is from England, where they pretty well “wallpaper everything” – and generally in flowery prints – so this bird-and-foliage pattern felt like home to her.

She got a good deal on it, too. Bought new, this paper is about $150 a double roll. Well, she stumbled upon an unopened bolt at an art store for a steal, and snatched it up. Once I got to the house and measured, though, it was clear that she would need more paper. Once again, she got lucky, by finding two more bolts on ebay for a price way below retail.

Unfortunately, the run number of the original paper did not match the run number of the new ebay paper, so we had the potential for color variations between strips. Also, the room really should have had four bolts, not the three we had.

But I measured the walls carefully, counted how many strips would be needed, figured where I would be able to fudge on the pattern, and then rolled out the paper to see how we would do. It turned out that this homeowner was, once again, lucky, because the baseboard and crown molding in the room reduced the wall height from 8′ to 7′ – and that was just enough to allow me to get four strips of paper from each bolt, instead of the usual three.

There was just enough paper to do the room, and I was able to keep the different runs on separate walls, so there were no eye-jarring color variations between strips. We ended up with, literally, about 2′ of paper left over. Whew!

This wallpaper is by Cole & Son, a British company, and is printed on a traditional pulp substrate, different from the non-woven material that they are using these days for much of their paper. Pulp papers do not have a protective coatings so they will look wet if they get splashed by water. They also will not stand up to stains or spills of any kind, and you have to be careful not to touch the paper when reaching for a light switch, or the paper may discolor from oils in your hands.

That said, I love the pulps, because the colors and inks and matt finish are unique and beautiful. They lie flat on your wall and don’t have issues with curling at the seams or delaminating like vinyl papers sometimes do.

I hung this in the powder room of a 1930’s home in Riverside (near downtown Houston).  Most everything in the home (floors, tile, sinks, faucets, windows, doors, doorknobs, stairway’s iron railing, telephone nook, stained glass windows, Art Deco features, on and on) are original to the home, and are in perfect condition.  The home even has plaster walls!   These elements are reveared and will be preserved by the homeowners.    It was a real honor to work there.