David Hicks’s “Hexagon” in a Master Bathroom – Note the Freestanding Bathtub

David Hicks’s “Hexagon” pattern by Cole & Son is a well-loved design. I’ve hung it a number of times. Here it is in a large master bathroom in a very Mid-Century Modern home in the Piney Point (Villages) neighborhood of Houston.

Just this bathtub alcove, along with two small mirror walls over the his-and-hers vanities, received wallpaper.

Just the tub alcove by itself took me over six hours to hang (six single rolls). The complicating issues were unplumb walls, unlevel ceiling and soffit, a geometric pattern that the eye wants to see marching evenly across the walls, thick stiff paper that is hard to manipulate, ink that wants to crack and flake off the paper, complicated room lay-out, and … squeezing behind that tub to put wallpaper on the walls around it!

There are some spots where the pattern match is off a bit, and some areas where the crookedness of the walls is very evident (meaning that the pattern goes off-kilter). But overall, the room turned out great.

The design is called “Hexagon,” and is by David Hicks, designer for Cole & Son, a British company who has been manufacturing wallpaper for way more than a hundred years.

It’s a non-woven material that can be hung by the paste-the-wall method, but I chose to paste the paper, which made it more pliable, and which made it easier to get paste where it needed to be when going around the window areas and behind the tub.

Difficult Decision

Here is a large powder room (with shower!) in a new home in the Houston Heights. One wall inside the shower enclosure was under the stairs, so it had a short sloped area. There was also some vertical wall – but it rose higher than the crown molding that ran around the rest of the room. The dilemma was which surfaces should be covered with wallpaper?

Paper the horizontal wall up to where it meets up with the sloped wall? Paper the sloped wall? Paper both? Paper neither? Choose a coordinating color and paint one or more areas?

In the end, I chose to run a horizontal line between the crown molding on the left and the molding on the right, and then stop the paper at this line. It doesn’t cover the whole wall space, but from down on the floor, your eye doesn’t catch this.

And I think it looks much better to maintain the horizontal line of the paper ending at the bottom of the crown molding, so it is homogeneous all the way around the room.

This wallpaper is by David Hicks, for Cole & Son, and is called Hick’s hexagon.

Geometric Wallpaper Makes for a Stunning Entry

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Geometric prints like this are very popular right now. They look great in the room – but they can be a real challenge to the installer. Walls and door / window moldings are never perfectly plumb, nor are baseboards and ceilings perfectly level.

With a wild pattern or a forgiving floral, you would never notice patterns going amiss. But with a rhythmic geometric design, your eye will catch any little element that is off.

Here, in some areas, I chose to hang the pattern off-plumb, so that it would align with the un-plumb vertical lines of the woodwork. Doing it this way made sure that the design motifs were uniform in size as they dropped from ceiling to floor along the door moldings – even though that made the top black triangle drop down a little as it moved across the ceiling line.

I was lucky in this room, because the height of the strips over the doorways was short, and I could fudge things a little and bring the pattern up to where I wanted it to be, with the black triangle hitting the bottom of the crown molding, which put the design motif back exactly where I wanted it to hit the ceiling line. See 3rd photo.

In the corners, I followed the rule, “It’s better to match the pattern in the corners, than to have it run perfectly along the ceiling.” I won’t go into details, but that corner in the 2nd photo took quite a bit of plotting and work. The pattern does not hang plumb, and it does not run straight down the door molding to the right. But, in the end, you don’t notice anything amiss, and the overall look is fantastic.

With all this engineering and plotting and manipulating, the two walls in the second photo took me about three hours to hang. The rest of the room was equally challenging.

In addition, the paper was thick and stiff and difficult to work into tight spaces. It was a “paste the wall” product, but when I tried that, I got puckered seams (due to the “dimensionally stable” paper expanding when it got wet with paste), as well as curled seams (due to the substrate absorbing moisture from the paste at a different rate from that of the inked top layer of the paper.

So I threw caution to the wind and ignored the manufacturer’s admonitions to “Paste the wall. Do NOT paste the paper.” Instead, I pasted the paper, and let it book (sit wet) for a short time, before I hung it. This let the paper absorb moisture from the paste and expand as much as it wanted to BEFORE I got it to the wall. It also made it more pliable and easy to work with.

It also, unfortunately, made the surface less stable, which meant that I had more instances of ink flaking off the paper. In fact, I had to discard one whole 9′ strip, because of one crease-with-chipped-off-ink. It was small, but it happened near a light switch plate, so it was in a very obvious spot, so had to be replaced. Note: Always buy more than you need, so you will have extra in case of the need for repairs down the road..

Fudging the pattern, hanging things off-plumb, and not accepting flaky paper paid off, though. Despite all the little indescrepencies that I fret over, none of them are really noticeable at all, and the the finished room looks fantastic.

This wallpaper is by GP & J Baker, a British company. It’s in their Groundworks line, and is by Ashley Hicks, for her famous father, David Hicks, who is well known for his black, gold, and cream geometric patterns, the most well-known being the hexagon. Google it, or do a Search on my blog.

The interior designers for this job are Neal LeBouef and Anthony Stransky, of L Design Group. Wonderful guys, and I love their crisp, clean, sophisticated style. The home is in West University Place (Houston).

David Hicks’s Popular Hexagon Pattern in a Powder Room

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People love this wallpaper pattern, company after company is knocking it off, and I have hung it a bunch of times. This under-the-stairs powder room was originally painted a baby blue. It was clean and airy, but ho-hum. Clothing the walls with this pattern added personality and dimension, and really brought the room to life.

This particular version is by Cole & Son, a British wallpaper company. It is printed on a non-woven substrate, and can be pasted, or you can use the paste-the-wall method.

It is thick and stiff, hard to cut, and somewhat difficult to work with, particularly in detailed areas, like around the light fixtures (which could not be removed, unfortunately), and around and under the pedestal sink. Here (and on the strips that went behind the toilet), pasting the paper was the best option, but the moisture from the paste, and the need to manipulate the paper around so many elements, put stress on the inks. The black ink likes to flake off, and some of the gold does, too. A Sharpie can come in handy! Pasting the wall worked well on strips that had no obstacles to cut around.

Add to that the bowed walls, the unplumb walls, the unlevel sink, the unlevel floor, and the rigid geometric pattern … and it was a challenge to work with. In the end, the overall look was fantastic, and the homeowners are eagerly planning their weekend, so they can finish decking out the room.

David Hicks’ Hexagon

My client loves this pattern, and originally wanted to use it in her entry way. But they realized it would be too overwhelming on all four walls.

Instead, she had me put it on one wall at the far end of a hallway. Here, it adds a lot of pizzazz, without overpowering the space. Wallpapering just one wall is a lot cheaper, too.

They’ll probably hang a piece of art on the wall eventually, but for now, the wife just wants to enjly the wall of bold pattern.

This design is by David Hicks, for Cole & Son, and is quite popular right now. Pattern # 66/8056