Leaving “Cute” and Heading for “Sophisticated”

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The tiny red and blue floral wallpaper pattern looked great in this Tanglewood powder room for a decade or more.  But when the homeowners wanted to freshen up the look of the house, the interior designers moved toward a more sophisticated look, and they chose this muted stripe pattern.

It’s more subdued, and it really goes nicely with the blue paint below the chair rail.

The interior designers for this job are Neal LeBouef and Anthony Stransky of L Design Group, a Houston-based company.

The wallpaper is a pre-pasted product by Sure Strip, and is in the Waverly line.  It goes up easily, and is designed to strip off easily later, when it’s time to redecorate.  I love this particular product.

 

Fun Geometric Wallpaper in a High School Teen’s Bedroom

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What 15 year old girl would not love this wallpaper pattern?! And when she leaves for college and her room gets turned over to guests, the paper will still be perfect!

One photo shows the use of my laser level, to be sure the first strip hangs perfectly plumb. I measured and centered the pattern on the wall horizontally, so it would fall perfectly behind the arched headboard, and the laser level was also useful to mark the spot for that fist strip to land.

This wallpaper pattern went on one accent wall, and the black ceiling really sets the room off! It is called “Riviera” and is by Cole & Son, a British company. It is on a thickish non-woven stock, and was a paste-the-wall install process.  Don’t tell anyone, but I think it looks a little like grasshopper heads.  🙂

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).

Patterned Wallpaper on the Ceiling – Not My Fave

One of my clients is deliberating whether or not to run her wallpaper up onto the ceiling. Most of the time, I discourage this. Although lots of interior designers just love this look, I think it crunches the ceiling down and makes the room feel closed in.

It CAN work, though, sometimes. I’d recommend a pattern different from the pattern on the walls, and as plain as possible. In this photo, for example, if the pattern had just the tiny leaves, and in a lighter color, it would not be so overwhelming on the ceiling.

Wallpaper on the Heights Home Tour

I love home tours, and see as many each year as I can. And while I’m in the homes, I always scout around to see if they’ve used wallpaper. This year, two of the homes on the Heights tour had wallpaper.

One was a fairly contemporary home. They used a silvery grey blue grasscloth in the powder room. This had a fairly fine texture, and I didn’t notice any shading / paneling (see my previous posts). While I don’t recommend grasscloth in bathrooms due to its propensity to stain when it gets wet, it sure did look good in this home.

Upstairs, they had an accent wall in the son’s bedroom that was a very unusual pattern. Basically, it was blocks of color running in horizontal stripes. Some were squares, some were rectangles, and some were blocks that verticle stripes, but all were more or less blocks of the same size (about 5″ square) running in horizontal rows across the wall.

Another home had grasscloth in one of the rooms. I remember noting that it had thick reeds on it, and I thought about how difficult it is to cut those reeds, and how especially hard it is to get them to turn corners.

The master bedroom had wallpaper on the ceiling. It was a dark grey with little circles on it. The docent kept talking about how beautiful it was, and other tour-goers were ooo’ing and aaw’ing over it. But I kept thinking how it visually dropped down the ceiling and closed in the room, and how much prettier and more airy it would have looked if they used the same pattern but a lighter color.

Another home also had wallpaper on the ceiling of the master bedroom, and was also fairly dark in color. This time it was a textured paper, 5″ squares, if I’m remembering correctly, and had a fauxed finish glaze over it, to bring out the embossing (textured pattern). While I appreciated the worksmanship that went into the installation and painting, again, I wasn’t too keen on dark wallpaper on a ceiling.

Then again, interior designers seem to love the look, and plenty of homeowners like it, too. There you go – to each his own!