From 20 Years of Red to Sweet Light Floral

Red is a classic dining room color, and painted walls served well since the late ’90’s. This homeowner has classic taste – note the elegant moldings below the chair rail and around the windows.

The update is lighter and brighter and opens up the room, making it feel larger.
Note the wallpaper around the corner on the right.

This is the paper in the adjoining hallway, which has been in place for decades. The new pattern coordinates beautifully in theme and color!

Close-up. Roses and script.

Norwall is a very economical brand (something like $25 per double roll on sale). Not my favorite quality, because the gritty paper backing can absorb humidity and separate from the thick vinyl surface, plus the seams tend to “pouch” a bit and don’t look great. But I’ve discovered that rolling a bit of wallpaper paste onto the wall under the seam areas will help to “suck down” the edges, creating better seams. I also do believe that the manufacturer has improved the substrate.

I was pleased with the way the seams looked on this install. You’re looking at a very close-up picture. Once the paper is dried and from two feet away, these seams will be invisible. In fact, the homeowner kept walking around the room remarking how she couldn’t even find a seam. Note the slightly textured surface.

The home is in the far west area of Houston.

Hallway Wallpaper Repair – Thibaut Honshu

This couple in the West University neighborhood of Houston loves color and avant garde – unexpected and fun! I hung this Honshu wallpaper by Thibaut in their small hallway at the beginning of the pandemic – April 2020. Since then, they decided to change the faucets and showerhead in the bathroom on the other side of this wall. To access the pipes, the plumber had to cut a hole in the drywall. The ‘guy’ that this couple uses did a fantastic job of cutting the drywall, preserving the wallpaper, and then patching the hole. You can even see that his cuts are perfectly level and plumb!

Slapping wallpaper patches over the two holes would have probably sufficed. But I wanted to make it better, so I stripped off and replaced the old wallpaper. This meant patching the guy’s drywall repairs. I didn’t get a photo, but I used drywall tape and joint compound to even out the areas. A heavy duty floor fan plus a heat gun helped get the smoothing compound to dry in a few hours. I sanded smooth and applied wallpaper primer, and ended up with what you see in the photo.

To conserve paper, instead of replacing the entire two strips from ceiling to floor, which could have caused some problems with matching the pattern on the left side, I patched in about one foot down from the ceiling line. To disguise the appliqued area, I used a scissors and trimmed around the wallpaper design, as you see here. This is less visible than a straight horizontal cut.

In this photo, the two strips have been put into place. You could never tell there was a hole (or two) !

An English (Scots) Country Garden

In 2014, I hung this fun and cheerful pattern in a 2nd floor hallway in a 1940’s home of a young family in the Garden Oaks neighorhood of Houston. Seven years later, it’s time for a change.

In addition to changing the pattern in the upstairs hall, the homeowner wanted to paper this lower, adjoining wall. Here I’m applying smoothing compound to the textured surface. Once it is dry, I will sand it smooth, and then roll on a wallpaper primer.

Finished. The homeowners are contemplating more updates to the home. … And will probably opt to change the color on the wall above … I am rooting for murky green or muddy brown / gold.

Detail.

Close-up. I love the way the motifs look as if they were cut from a magazine and then decoupaged into place. The flowers look hand-painted. But the bees look like photographs.

Lola Design is the manufacturer.

No all-white, minimalist décor for these homeowners! Hailing from the British island of Scotland, and being artists at heart, they crave color, life, activity, and joy. This “Mixed Bee” design is the perfect mix of classic British floral interior décor and outdoor garden lushness.

The manufacturer is Lola Design. The material is non-woven, and can be hung via the paste-the-wall method,,,, although I preferred the softness and flexibility produced by pasting the paper.

Warmth With An Ethnic Feel For Heights Hallway

Boring

Warm and engaging, without overpowering

“Appleton” by Sister Parish

One doesn’t spend much time in this tiny hallway separating the living / dining rooms from the family room / kitchen. But the homeowner – an interior designer – felt the small space merited more attention.

This medium-scale, tight, two-color design called “Appleton” by Sister Parish fills and warms the space nicely, without overwhelming.

Further, it’s a wonderful backdrop to two hand-carved sculptures that will hang on the wall – both are sort of figureheads (like on the front of a pirate ship). They exhibit both a feminine and Asian look.

The wallpaper sets these works of art off way better than the previous plain painted wall.

The interior designer is Stacie Cokinos of Cokinos Design.

Cute, Sweet Pink & Blue Hallway

This is one of those houses that has a lot of crystal and glitter. The little girl’s bedroom has a LOT of crystal, glitter – and PINK.

So this hallway, which leads to both the girl’s room and to a glitzy guest bedroom, is fittingly outfitted with a navy-floral-on-pink wallpaper pattern. The colors show up much better in real life than on my phone camera shots.

The wallpaper is by designer Caitlin Wilson, made by York, in their Sure Strip line, and is one of my favorite wallpapers. It is a pre-pasted material. It is designed to strip off the wall easily when it’s time to redecorate.

Wallpaper in Victoria Magazine

I always love to see wallpaper featured in magazines. Victoria’s spring 2018 issue showed these rooms, which are in the Twin Farms inn in Vermont.

The small print on soft blue serves as a nice backdrop for a soothing bedroom retreat. But I like the quirky turtle design used in the hallway, and I love the red color.

Even better is the classic scenic mural in the entryway. Most likely, this is a custom-made, hand-painted, and fittingly expensive mural that comes in panels that must be meticulously measured for each specific section of the room, and then painstakingly installed with special materials and delicate care. Some of these are very old (a hundred years or more), but they are still being made today – but most recreate the old look of their original era.

Some brands, such as Gracie, Fromental, de Gournay, are quite pricy. But there are plenty of other manufacturers producing products with a similar look at prices attractive to the Average Joe Homeowner.

Showing Off A Friend’s Work

I didn’t hang this wallpaper, but a friend of mine did. I wanted to showcase his outstanding workmanship in a very difficult and time-consuming setting – entry with 2-story curved stairway and upper hallway.

Applause to Alex & Irma Sanchez, of Space City Wallcoverings.

Crazy Wild Pattern and COLOR!

Same 1929 bungalow in West U (Houston) as yesterday. Both the husband and wife have what I call “BIG personalities.” No way they’re gonna live with boring white walls – they like COLOR and PATTERN.

This very small hallway is the perfect place to pull off a really dramatic punch of color and pattern. What makes it even better is the lime green woodwork! (What’s even more cool is that the husband chose the green color (most husbands try to avoid decorating at all costs).

The wallpaper pattern is called Honshu, and is by Thibaut Designs.

This hallway is adjacent to the orange dining room I blogged about yesterday, and the colors and themes blend together beautifully.

Note the old telephone niche built into the wall – and painted that super fun lime green color.

The Honshu is a wild pattern on its own. But what really makes the room is the green accents in the moldings. They even painted the frame around the trap door to the attic!

Transforming a Stark Hallway

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This young couple in the Garden Oaks neighborhood of Houston has a beautifully updated and furnished 1940 ranch style home. But they wanted to up the volume, so to speak, and thought that this hallway, which slices through the center of the home, would make a fine focal point.

I’ve hung this classic damask pattern twice before, and was carrying around a sample of it when I visited them for an initial consultation. They liked it immediately, and, after considering several other patterns, decided on the damask.

To make the area really special, they added a chair rail and crown molding.

It’s hard to get a good shot of a long, narrow hallway. But you can see how the color and pattern adds warmth and dimension to the space, and the lightly pearlized shimmer of the paper definitely adds a touch of understated glamor.

Since the chair rail was a main feature of the room, I positioned the pattern so that the bottom of the damask motif landed just above the chair rail. Likewise, the top of the motif sits just below the crown molding. This looks a lot better than having part of the design chopped off in mid-motif.

This wallpaper is by Designer Wallpapers, and was delightful to work with. 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.

In fact, the couple is going to meet with Dorota tomorrow, to choose a complimentary paint color for the bottom portion of the walls.

Making A Statement Coming Up The Stairs

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The lady of the house (a “tall skinny house” in the Houston Heights neighborhood), has a super eye for decorating, and the first floor looks like it was decorated by a highly-trained professional interior designer – but it is all the work of the homeowner.

But she thought that coming up the stairs to the second floor, the upstairs just looked boring. This short hallway is what you see as you walk up the stairs. With the beautiful woodwork and paint, it’s attractive, but it is boring. The homeowner found this fun palm-frond pattern via Anthropologie, and knew it would be perfect for this space.

She mentioned putting it on the ceiling, too, and I tried to talk her out of it, because I think that wallpaper on the ceiling crunches the ceiling down and makes the space claustrophobic. I also had not included the ceiling when I measured the room, so I didn’t think we would have enough paper to cover that additional surface.

But I could tell that she really wanted the paper on the ceiling, so I did some plotting and measuring and engineering, and managed to cover the ceiling and the walls with the paper that we had.

Once it was up, and when I stood on the stairs and looked forward, I have to admit – the gal’s decorating sense was spot-on – papering the ceiling was the perfect treatment!

One reason the pattern works so well here is because of the white crown molding breaking up the pattern on the walls from the pattern on the ceiling. If there were no crown molding, and the palm fronds on the walls connected to the fronds on the ceiling, I think it would have been too busy. (We also would not have had enough paper, due to having to match the pattern on the wall so it lines up with the pattern on the ceiling, which would have eaten up a lot more paper.)

This wallpaper is pre-pasted, and is in the Sure-Strip line (which I really like) by York Wallcoverings, and was purchased through Anthropologie.