Adventurous, Fanciful Punch of Color and Theme

The homeowners are into comics and fantasy art. While I hung a calm crocodile hide textured wallpaper in the home office, the couple chose this wild and boldly hued zebra pattern for the adjoining bathroom.
I just love the way the bright orange pops out against the white vanity, countertop, toilet, floor, shower tile, and moldings.

This pattern is called Lost World and is by Clarke & Clarke . It’s a nice non-woven material, was easy to work with, and will hold up well, even under humid conditions if the shower in this bathroom is used.

Disguising Kill Point Over the Door

As you hang wallpaper around a room, your last corner, where your last strip meets up with the first strip (the “kill point”), virtually always results in a pattern mis-match. That’s why we try to place this in an obscure corner, or where it will be hidden by a door.

In this room, I could have put the kill point in the corner. But that would have left us with a pattern mis-match a full 9′ long, from ceiling to floor. Yeah, when the door was open against that wall, it would have obscured it. But I thought I could give this family a better look.

I moved the kill point to over the door.

I forgot to take a picture of how the final strip of paper would fall, so can’t show how the pattern would have mis-matched. That last strip was placed moving from left to right, as it butted against the strip to the left, and then landed on top of the strip on the right.

The design on the final strip didn’t match up with the strip on the right, so we ended up with a mis-match. This pattern is wild enough, and the 20″ high section up over the door is not really very obvious to anyone standing in the small room. But I just knew that I could make it look better.

I cut along the right edge of that final strip, tracing along the outline of the design. Once that was overlapped onto the existing strip, you could not detect a pattern mis-match. I did take to my scissors again to cut out a few additional tiny appliqués that I pasted on, to obscure one or two abrupt mis-match lines.

If you look closely, you’ll see that the design squares along that last seam are a bit closer together than they should be. But – who’s going to notice that? This is far better than a 9′ long pattern mis-match running the full height of the corner.

Textured Faux Crocodile in Montrose Powder Room

From flat and white to textured and black, this powder room took a trip to the wild and exotic. The embossed vinyl wallpaper mimics the look of crocodile hide.

I centered the design on the sink wall, so the pattern would frame the mirror evenly. Then, since the toilet wall is the first thing you see when you enter the room, I thought it would look nice to have the pattern centered on that wall, too. Usually, you can only balance the pattern on one wall, and after that, the design has to fall sequentially as it works its way around the room. But I did some engineering, and figured a way to place the pattern in the center of the toilet wall, too.

The material is an unusually thin and flexible embossed vinyl on a thin non-woven substrate. It’s my second time in this year to hang this, and I like it a lot – much better than most non-wovens, which can be thick and stiff and can bruise easily.

Non-wovens have some fiberglass in their content and do not expand when they are wet with paste, nor do they shrink as they dry. They can be hung immediately after pasting – or you can use the paste-the-wall method. Non-wovens are designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece when it’s time to redecorate.

This is in the SuperFresco line by Graham & Brown, one of my preferred manufacturers. You don’t need a retailer, because this can be bought directly from the G&B website.

The home is new build, contemporary in style, in the Montrose area of central Houston.
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