Powder Room Goes BIG and BOLD With COLOR

Enter another typically all-white-and-grey new home in suburbia – Towne Lake, Cypress (northwest Houston).

The homeowner, however, loves color, and is slowly adding her personality to the home. Starting with this powder room. You can’t get more fun than lime green and navy blue – with birds and flowers tossed in, too!

The wallpaper is called Giselle, and is by Thibaut, one of my favorite brands. The pattern has an unusually long 36″ repeat, and one photo shows me rolling it out on the floor to get a perspective before I start laying out the room.

Brilliantly Colored Spring Green in a Hall Bathroom

Digital Image

Digital Image

Digital Image

The homeowners stripped their old wallpaper off eight years ago. Well, since then, they never quite got around to buying or hanging new wallpaper. (That’s kinda like how things go around here, says the gal who’s had a chandelier sitting on her bedroom floor waiting to be hung since April 2014.) So this hall bathroom has been naked for eight years. Time to get crackin’!

The homeowners’ daughter is an interior designer in Kansas City (Tess Hawes), and when she visited Houston, she got things rolling by choosing wallpaper and paint, and then called me.

Stripping the old paper left gritty, sand-like paste residue on the walls. The first thing I did was to sand the walls to remove as much of this as I could. Then I skim-floated the walls with joint compound. Once this was dry, I sanded it smooth and primed with Gardz, a penetrating sealer. Photo 1 is how it looked when I left last night.

The lighting in the room was poor, so I didn’t get any good full-size “after” shots. But you can see the beautiful, vivid color of this paper, and the bird-and-foliage theme.

The bathroom had one window, that looked out to a magnolia tree, and, beyond that, more greenery. The spring-green color of the wallpaper against the room’s white woodwork, with the trees and foliage outside the window, was stunning. Crisp and cheerful and vibrant.

The designer had the vanity painted a cobalt blue, which looked fantastic against the lime green wallpaper, and played perfectly off the blue accents in the paper.

This wallpaper is by Thibaut Designs.