Vinyl Faux Grasscloth in Guest Bathroom

Before. Walls primed and ready for wallpaper .

Vanity area done. This blue , brown , and metallic gold material has the warm look and texture of real grasscloth, but is much more water- and stain-resistant and consistent in color . It also has a pattern that can be matched , so the seams are much less visible than with real grass . Note that some of the lines you’re seeing in the photo are cast by the light fixture .

Going around these arched windows took a while!

Toilet wall without lights off.

With lights on, you see the true colors more accurately. Note the light fixture casting vertical stripes on the wall .

Like many thick, textured vinyl products, the edges curl back just a teeny bit, due to how the material is trimmed at the factory. Believe it or not, run your finger over this seam and you’ll feel that it’s perfectly flat. In fact, this look is typical with real grasscloth, because the edges tend to fray up a bit. From two feet away, you don’t notice any of this.

This material mimics the look and texture of real grasscloth .

Another wall, along the shower . One nice thing about grasscloth is that, since you don’t need to match pattern motifs, you don’t have to paper walls in sequence or order. We were a little tight on material on this job, so I hung my full length walls first, then went back and hung the shorter walls. This helped me plan usage – how many strips needed and how many strips I could get out of each roll / bolt of paper .

Made by York , one of my favorite manufacturers.

Nobody Else Has This! – Jack Rabbit Floating Wall

This wall between the kitchen and home office is what we call a floating wall. It directly faces the TV / family room. I can guarantee you – NO ONE else has such a bold and eye-popping wall treatment!

This “Jack Rabbit” mural comes as six panels, some with rabbits and some with just foliage, that can be placed next to each other in any combination.

The homeowner was originally considering this for her guest bathroom.

But the project was going to take a good number of panels. And, at $375 per panel, the price was getting out of reason.

This floating wall in the main living area was a much better option.

For one thing, only one panel was needed.

For another, because this is the area everyone passes through when leaving or entering the house, or looks toward while sitting on the sofa, the rabbits are front and center for maximum viewing.

Each 40″ wide Jack Rabbit mural panel is on a non-woven substrate with a thin vinyl coating, and is a paste-the-wall material. The quirky design is by Edmond Petit and was purchased through Finest Wallpaper, a newish company out of Canada, with a vast product selection, great customer service, low prices, and quick turn-around.

The home is in the West University / Southside Place area of Houston.

Anaglypta Textured Wallpaper – Tough Day at Work Today

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This homeowner wanted to brighten up a drab bathroom (previous paper was a dark tan, with no pattern). She loves texture, and was thrilled to find this herringbone “man’s suit” pattern by Anaglypta.

This is an embossed paper, and the herringbone pattern is quite deep and tactile.

So all that was quite nice for the homeowner. What was not so nice for me was that the material was positively horrible to work with.

It was so thick and stiff that it was honestly impossible to unroll it, let alone lay it out flat so it could be pasted.

Even gentle handling could cause it to crease. Laying my straight edge against it could cause it to crease.

It was impossible to paste, book, and then table-trim, as one would do with a “normal” wallpaper.

I finally started sponging the back with clean water, which relaxed it enough to open it up, so I could paste it.

Once I got a pasted strip to the wall, it was not easy to press the hard stuff against moldings or ceiling, so it was difficult to get tight cuts in those areas.

Cutting around curved crown molding was a challenge – I couldn’t see around it or feel through it, so it was tedious going.

The seams showed a little, depending on what angle you are looking from, because the puffy texture of the herringbone on one strip didn’t necessarily line up with the puffy texture on the next strip.

The last pic is a shot of just this. The photo doesn’t look all that bad . … It looks worse in real life.

It took me probably twice the originally planned time to hang this bathroom. Let’s just say that I was there ’til way after dark.

The end result, though, is that it looks great. The homeowner loves it, and said that she is “beyond pleased.”

Still, I’d like to point out that there are companies that make textured, embossed, paintable wallpapers that are not such bugger-bears to work with. Most of these other brands are softer and more pliable, and will allow themselves to be worked around turns and moldings and etc. My wallpaper source (below) can help you find one.

I hung this in a guest bathroom in a newish home in Montrose (Houston). The wallpaper is by Anaglypta, a company that dates back to the 1800’s. The paper can be left as-is, or it can be painted.

It was bought at below retail price from Dorota Hartwig at Southwestern Paint on Bissonnet near Kirby. (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.

Walnut SeaScape

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This is a new build in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston. I papered an accent wall in a guest bathroom in the home. Kind of unusual to do just one wall in a bathroom, because bathrooms tend to be chopped up, and it looks better to have a homogeneous treatment to all the walls. But this guest bath was large, and had a long, uninterrupted wall behind the sink / mirror. And this turned out to be perfect as a feature wall with wallpaper.

This is a dramatic wall full of color and whimsy. The manufacturer is Walnut. The paper had to be hand-trimmed, to remove the selvedge edge, which is an exacting and tedious process. See photo.

Aside from the crazy pattern match (see other post), this wallpaper was a joy to work with, and it will hold up nicely in the bathroom environment.

Silvery Trees in a Powder Room

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This soft and silvery paper coordinates beautifully with the Carrera marble counter top and the tile floor in this guest bathroom in a nicely remodeled older home in the Houston Heights. (The builder is Ridgewater Homes, and I was very impressed with the quality of their work.)

As usual with the brand Schumacher, I had some printing defects, and also some smudging on the back of one roll (4th & 5th photos). Also, with their moth bally-smelling ink, as with other brands that use this ink, the seams curled at the points were the ink hit the seam (3rd photo). This is because the ink absorbs moisture from the paste differently from how the paper absorbs moisture, so they expand at different rates, causing curling at the seams.

Once the paper was good and dry, these areas mostly laid down, but there were still quite a few seams that were not perfectly flat.

The wallpaper pattern is named “Twiggy.” The interior designer for this job is Rachel Goetz, who works in the Heights area a lot, and has a soft, clean, uncluttered, fresh look to the rooms she decorates.

Chinoiserie in a Small Bathroom

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Here is a classic Chinoiserie (Oriental design) that went in a guest bathroom in a new addition to a 1950’s ranch style Mid-Century Modern home in Shepherd Park Plaza / Oak Forest.

The aqua background coordinates nicely with the grey marble vanity. I lined up the figure holding the umbrella with the center spout on the sink, for a balanced look. The two circles at the top are the bases of light fixtures.

The pattern is called Shantung Silhouette, and is by Schumacher.

Schumacher used to be known for quality, higher-end wallpapers. But these days, the quality has slipped. This install did not have any printing defects, but they are pretty much de rigor with Schumacher products. I did encounter some other problems, though.

For starters, the instructions said this was a paste-the-wall non-woven material. It was not. It was paper, and needed to have paste applied to the back of the wallpaper, not to the wall.

And the material was thick and stiff and difficult to handle on my table, and difficult to manipulate into corners and tight areas. Going around the multiple curves on the backsplash was tricky and time consuming. Pasting the wall did not allow the paper to expand and relax, so bubbles appeared on the wall. Because the paper was dry and stiff, it did not meld to the contours of the vanity top, and was difficult to trim neatly. In fact, I was unhappy with my first attempt, and ripped it off and started over.

A good reminder to always buy a little extra paper.

I also was not happy with the seams. They weren’t bad, but a thinner substrate would have given tighter seams that held closer to the wall.

Overall, though, the room looked wonderful – light and airy with a sense of uplift from the parasols and tight ropes. The monkey adds something to smile at.

The interior designer for this job is Rachel Goetz.

Fudging the Match / Fooling the Eye

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Wallpaper patterns are designed to match, when one strip is hung next to another. Usually, there is no wiggle room, and each strip has to be hung in sequential order. But this particular pattern (called Chaiva Segrete, by Cole & Son, in their Fornasetti line), is free-form enough that it can be tweaked, when need be. I used this to my advantage in three corners of this guest bathroom.

You never wrap wallpaper around an inside corner. Instead, you wrap a fraction of an inch around the corner, then cut the paper vertically, and then overlap the “new” strip on top of the existing strip, in the corner. But if that “new” strip chances to be very narrow, there is a large possibility that it will hang crooked, causing problems like gapping and overlapping with each subsequent strip that has to hang next to it on that wall. But if you don’t butt the next strip up to this narrow, crooked strip, the pattern match will be off.

In another scenario, I wanted to avoid cutting against the shower’s tile grout, which can cause an irregular, un-straight cut (in addition to devouring my razor blades), so I wanted to hang a fresh strip butted against the tile and then work back to the previously-hung corner.

What to do?!

My solution was to create a new piece that looked like it matched, even if it didn’t. I found a place in the pattern that had only leaves, making sure that no motifs (the keys) would be cut up. I carefully cut around the leaf motifs, creating an irregular edge to the strip of wallpaper. (Photo 2) Then I hung the strip of wallpaper, allowing the irregular edge to wrap around the corner, overlapping the previous strip of wallpaper. Once it was smoothed into place, you would not see that this was not the intended pattern match. (Photo 3)

In another area (no photo), I used the same technique to bring a narrow 6″ strip along the side of a closet door up to meet (but not perfectly match) the wallpaper over the door.

With the right pattern, this trick works well. It saves paper, saves time, and eliminates gaps and overlaps.

In fact, in the last photo, in an entirely different corner, floor to ceiling, I have employed the same technique – and I’ll bet you cannot spot the area that is not the factory match!

Leaves & Keys in a Memorial-Area Guest Bathroom

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This guest bathroom looked good with it’s mint green paint and standard-issue fixtures. (In the top photo, it is covered with a coat of my thin white wallpaper primer.)  But when the homeowners updated the bath to include tumbled marble tile on the floor and in the shower, and a white-and-grey marble on the vanity, it was clear that the blah green paint had to go.

The tone-on-tone tan colors in this wallpaper blend with the new tile perfectly, and the simple scattered leaf pattern compliments the foggy look of the tile, while adding a calming, Zen-like feel to the bathroom.

This wallpaper pattern is by Cole & Son, a British company, a part of their Fornasetti line, pattern #97/4013, and is called Chaivi Segrete (sounds Italian to me – Google the translation!). I hung this in a guest bathroom of a busy family in the near-Memorial area of Houston.

Their job was set for way off in September (my next available date). But I had a schedule change, and, knowing that they had an unfinished, torn-up bathroom, I asked if they wanted to get done much sooner. Of course, they said Yes!