Milton & King Travelers Palm in Heights ( Houston ) Entry / Foyer

It’s hard to get a shot of this room, but here we are, looking from the family area through the entry vestibule toward the front door.
The sliding barn door on the right leads to the husband’s home office.
Here the walls are primed with my favorite Pro 977 Ultra Prime by Roman, and ready for wallpaper.

Paper’s up! Lighting and shadows are playing across the walls in some areas.

Opposite wall, west wall, primed and ready for wallpaper.

Done!

An interesting focal point in this room is this set of 100+ year old doors, reclaimed from a building in Arizona. The homeowner tells me that the door has been preserved from rot by the dry / arid climate in that state.
The dealer stripped the doors of years of paint and stain, and shipped them in their most “raw” state.
The doors were then fitted onto a track and hung to slide back and forth over the opening to the home office.

I love the way the weathered wood coordinates in color and texture with the wallpaper pattern.
It took a lot of measuring, trimming, engineering, and plotting to get the pattern so it aligned inside these two wall panels as if the pattern were continuing from the area outside the panels.

Close-up of the wallpaper design.

This material by Milton & King comes as a 2-roll set, consisting of one “A” roll and one “B” roll.
This entryway took four of the 2-roll sets.
Due to logistics, more strips from the “A” bolt were used than from the “B” roll.
Another reminder to always buy a little extra paper.

Milton & King makes some mighty fun wallpaper patterns. Visit their website!
The material is a washable vinyl on a soft and flexible non-woven substrate.
The material goes up on the wall like a dream, flexible and manipulable (is that a real word??!) and with seams that are invisible. When it’s time to redecorate, this non-woven material is designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece, with minimal / no damage to the wall.

The Fifteen-Hour Foyer Install – Whew!

Digital Image

Digital Image

Digital Image

Digital Image

This was one of the most difficult installations I’ve ever done. Many reasons … The grasscloth came un-trimmed, so I had to trim off the selvedge edge by hand for every strip. This is tedious and time-consuming enough with paper, but with grasscloth it’s harder because you have to press hard to get through the thick material. The room itself presents some time-eating elements, namely the intricate molding above the columns, and it takes time (like 20 minutes each) to cut the paper neatly into the curves. There were six of these curved points, plus four angled blocks in the center of the arches.

I told the homeowner to buy 10 single rolls. But the design studio where she bought it told her 8. So she bought 8 – and we were short. So I had to save every scrap, plot and plan, and spend extra time cutting and piecing slivers of left over paper, so we would have enough to do the areas over the arches. I also had to fudge on the pattern match, in order to have enough paper to do the whole room. This pattern is forgiving, so it’s not noticeable.

But the main difficulty was the extreme thickness of the gesso-like material on the paper. It was virtually IMPOSSIBLE to cut through. I mean, on the side of one doorway, on a 6′ drop, I spent a full 30 minutes, pressing with all my strength, and went through a good couple of razor blades, just to trim off the excess paper. Every other cut was equally difficult. Where the razor blades would not cut it, I used my $50 Japanese high technology scissors – which I am sure needs to be replaced after the workout it got last night.

The paper was also uncooperative when it came to wrapping it around two inside corners. It took a lot of work and heavy pressing on it with a special metal plate tool I have, just to get it to look nice and tight in the corners.

Other inside corners where the material was cut, there were small gaps between the thick layers of gesso. All of these were at the top of the walls, so were not very noticeable.

This room should have taken me about five hours to hang, if it had been a regular wallpaper. This couple was kind enough to let me work late to get the room finished. However, I was stunned when I finished, loaded up my van, and got in the driver’s seat – I had not realized how very late it was at night.

This product is by Schumacher. As usual, their quality control was poor. The homeowner had to send back the entire first batch, due to the gesso being smeared. There was one section in the new batch that was messed up, too.

The finished room does look great, though, and the thick texture adds a unique and warm look to this West University entryway. I plotted the pattern so that it would fall in the center of the archway that’s the first thing you see when you walk in the door.

Wallpaper & Martha Stewart’s Interior Designer

Readers of Martha Stewart’s Living magazine have been watching Kevin Sharkey, one of their design editors, as he shows us, month-by-month, how he is fixing up his new apartment.

In the current issue, he focuses on the entryway – “Entrance Strategy.”

Kevin says the entrance is like the HOV lane in your house, because people funnel into and through it quickly, without spending much time there.

So, he says, “If you love, love, love color, but don’t want to commit a larger room to it, a foyer is the perfect place to test a new hue. The same goes for fanciful wallpaper.”

So, if you’re not sure how wallpaper will work in your home, or are feeling timid about using pattern in a primary room, try starting out in a room that is not used much, such as the entry way.