Before. Good colors. But nothing inspiring. Done. Boy, this paper really visually pushed the walls away and made the room look larger ! Easy on the eye tone-on-tone pattern , lighter colors , and a teeny bit of gold sparkle .
Note the 5/8″ high strip of wallpaper under the medicine cabinet on the left.
Because those faucet handles sit up so high above the backsplash , it’s likely that when people reach for the handles, water will get splashed onto the wallpaper . To prevent splashed water from wicking up under the wallpaper – which could cause the paper to expand and curl away from the wall – I ran a bead of clear siliconized caulk along the top of the backsplash . The color is skewed in this shot, but you get an idea of the tropical foliage and pattern scale . Toile is a French word for a sort of pen and ink drawing in one color on a background that may be colored or may not be.Close-up , showing a truer color . Note the palm trees and the monkey . This material has a woven -look textured surface , and it mimics fabric . I almost felt like I was install ing linen , instead of wallpaper . The brand is Rasch , a company out of Germany . Their papers are consistently nice to work with. This one was unexpectedly thin and flexible . It’s textured vinyl on a non-woven substrate . The vinyl makes it durable and stain-resistant , and the NW makes it easy to remove later when you’re ready to redecorate . The seams are positively invisible. This powder room on the first floor just off the home office / study comes complete with a shower . Just for fun – one of the obstacles in this room was this rain shower head – sticking out right where I need to be on my ladder , and keeping me from reaching those walls . On top of that, the faucet handles also stuck out much further from the wall than most do. While priming the walls, as I was climbing down from the ladder , my clothing actually got entangled in the handles and – turned on the water ! Yes, I got a shower at work today ! The home is in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston .
Breakfast nook “before” is bright and airy – but washed out and uninspiring. The vertical tan lines are paint I’ve striped under where the seams will fall, to prevent the light colored primer from peeking through. “After” has warmth, life, and a cheery feel. With a little color contrast, now you can see the detailed woodwork and window molding. The paper has a bit of a tropical, thatched roof, Ernest Hemmingway, sort of feel. Note I’ve balanced / centered the pattern so it falls evenly and equally on either side of the window . Note how perfectly the motifs fill the space above the windows, as well as below the windows. It’s a minor thing that you don’t consciously notice, but it gives the room a grounded , balanced feeling . Another angle . The chandelier is a major feature in the room. I love the way the chunky beads repeat the color and theme of the white pattern in the wallpaper. Unlike most wallpapers that come in rolls of standard sizes , this material comes in continuous yardage on one huge (and HEAVY ) bolt . The height of the motifs perfectly fits the space between the window and the crown molding . No flower tops got chopped off in this room !There are five windows. This is the area between two of them, including an obtuse angle . It took a LONG time to get the paper around all five windows, keeping the pattern intact . Close-up showing the texture . This is a paperweave , which is similar to a grasscloth , as both are natural fibers and materials . Because this paper weave is woven, instead of having stiff, straight strands of grass crossing the wallpaper , it was a lot more flexible and workable than regular grasscloth .The space over the door molding was just 4 1/16″ high. The flower motif fit in here perfectly . You can see along the seam in the center of the photo , that some of the fibers may try to come off the backing , especially at seams and areas where you’ve cut into the material , such as trimming around window moldings and other obstacles . This is pretty minor . Overall, the seams are virtually invisible . One other thing I didn’t like about this paper is that, after the wallpaper was made, the color was applied to the front, like paint . This made the color subject to abrading or flaking off under even light rubbing . It would have been better IMO to have dyed the fibers and then sewn / glued them on to the paper backing . Then the color would go all the way through. Not a biggie – you just have to work slowly and carefully and gently. Oh, and you can’t get paste or water or fingerprints on the surface, either – because they can’t be washed off and can stain . The pattern is called Papavero and is by Casa Branca . The material has an unprinted selvedge edge that has to be trimmed off by hand, using a straightedge and razor blade . Takes a lot of extra time , and even more so because you have to press harder to get through the thick fibers than with a traditional wallpaper . A picture of my straightedge and razor blade . I’m trimming something else here (that will be blogged about later), but you get the idea . A really bad photo of a really perfect chandelier . It’s chunky , white , and the shape of the ‘beads’ repeat the flower motifs in the wallpaper. The windows will have Roman shades made of a somewhat coarse white linen type fabric , which will coordinate beautifully with the texture of the wallpaper . The home is in the Heights neighborhood of Houston .
Here is a stringcloth / grasscloth / linen sort of material that has a nice, tailored look. The thing is, when people make their buying decision, all they see is the page in a selection book, or the 8 x 10″ sample sent from the vendor. What they don’t see is how their selection will look when it’s actually up on a wall, with several strips next to each other.
The thin and close-together black and grey strings running vertically up the length of each bolt of wallpaper are not absolutely straight. So there are places where the black strings get closer to the edge of the wallpaper, and places where the grey strings get closer to the edge. And there are areas where the strings cross the edge of the paper and got chopped off by the trim rollers at the factory, leaving voids along the edges of the paper that now have no strings.
Look at the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th photos… the left edge of the sheets, to see what I am talking about.
All this is fine if you’re just looking at a bolt of wallpaper. But when it comes to placing a strip of paper next to another strip on the wall, what can happen is what you see in the photo at the top…. If an area where a grey string is closer to the right edge of the paper is placed next to a strip that happens to have a grey string closer to the left edge, then those two grey strings will butt up against each other, and they will create a wider-than-expected expanse of grey. That’s what you see in the photo.
The same can happen with a black string, or with an area where the string was cut and fell out of the edge, creating a void. Even if I forgo the factory edge and hand-trim my own edge, because the strings are not exactly straight on the paper, some will continue to land closer to or further from the edge, or even be cut and fall completely off the paper – When those edges meet up with one another on the wall, there will always be areas where grey meets up with grey (or black with black, etc.), and you get an effect like what you see in the photo.
This wallpaper is by York. More on how the install went on yesterday’s blog post.
This large 2nd floor room in a 1934 home in the West University neighborhood of Houston was home to two boys, who took it on a 20+ year ride through crayons, toy cars, sports, school projects, first dates, college entrance forms, and professional careers. Now that the sons are grown and gone, Mom is calling the room her own. She got rid of the dorm look and is going for something calming and sophisticated, with a farm-house twist.
On the ceiling, I hung wallpaper that looks like ship-lapped wood… Joanna Gaines “Magnolia” book by York, in their SureStrip line.
To augment that, the homeowner chose another York pattern, this soft brown / charcoal linen weave stringcloth. It’s a textured material that resembles the fabric of a man’s tailored suit.
It’s beautiful with the wood plank look on the ceiling, and creates a snug, cozy feel in the large room.
I wasn’t happy with the quality of the product. See my previous post about the mismatches at the seams.
In addition, the material was thick and difficult to trim, and difficult to turn around corners. But worse, whatever backing the manufacturer used sucked up paste like the dickens. I pasted the back and booked according to directions. Yet when I went to hang a strip, it didn’t want to stick to the wall. There was virtually no paste on the back … it had all been sucked up into the backing, leaving little on the surface to hold the strip onto the wall. The strips also had a lot of memory, and wanted to keep curling up.
Although the instructions said the substrate was paper, I believe it was a non-woven material. That means it was dimensionally-stable and didn’t need to book or sit for any period after pasting. I tried various installation techniques and finally settled on lightly misting the back of each strip with water , rolling it up and letting it sit for a few minutes while I rolled paste onto the wall (not the back of the paper). Then I applied the paper to the wall.
The misting relaxed the paper and stopped the curling, and also made the material more pliable. Pasting the wall made sure that paste was there to hold the paper to the wall, instead of letting the thirsty substrate soak it all up.
Even so, this has been a difficult install. The paper is thick and hard to trim, and there are issues with the seams that do not make me happy (see yesterday’s post). I worked an 8-hour today and only got two walls done. So I have to go back tomorrow, and the job will take a day longer than I had planned for.
The wallcovering is made by York. I usually like their products, but, like I said, I am a bit displeased with this stuff. The homeowner, however, loves it.
Look at this adorable display shelf! It is recessed into the wall, and has a cut-out in the “ceiling” for a small LED light, which will shine down on a decorative item inside.
This was in a new-born baby’s nursery, and the whole wall will be covered with these niches, in various sizes. Very sweet.
The new mother choose two wallpaper patterns for the room. One has soft water color looking butterflies, dragonflies, and flowers. The other is a textured paper that has a linen look, in a light tan or cream color. That’s the paper that is a backdrop to these display shelves.
Keeping the background calm ensures that the shelves and the items on them will remain the main focus.
This room is the right size, but is way too white for a precious baby girl. Mom had a vision to warm it up, and to bring some life and brightness in, too. This wallpaper is by Caselio, was made in France, but came to the U.S. via Mom in Brasil, to be hung in the new baby’s nursery in the Woodlands (Houston).
I started by smoothing the textured walls, and then I primed with Gardz. The pattern with the pink and lavender butterflies and dragonflies went on three “columns” in the room. The soft tan linen-look paper went on two opposite walls, one of which will hold a number of recessed shelves. After I papered the two linen walls and one butterfly wall, the homeowner thought about the room’s look overnight, and then decided to put the “fluttery” pattern on the remaining walls – around and over a door, and around a pair of windows.
The finished room is a serene and restful room, but the flying critters give it color and an uplifted feeling. Just perfect for a baby girl!
People these days LOVE textured wallpapers. I have blogged before about problems with many of the natural goods, such as grasscloth, and have told about advantages of the fakes. One of the best looking lines is by Thibaut.
Well, Thibaut has upped it’s ante, with it’s Edition 4 of the Texture Resource line. They’ve added more colors, more patterns – and the book is FANTASTIC!
Here are durable vinyl goods on a sturdy woven fabric backing, that will not stain if splashed with water, the color will be uniform from strip to strip, seams won’t show, no chance of paste staining the seams, and the cat won’tshred it to bits. (Well, I can’t guarantee that one… some cats are determined to destroy even the most iron-like vinyls.) The line features fake grasscloth patterns, linen look-alikes, wood grain, little tiny dots, and lots more.
The wallpaper is both visual and tactile – a real feast for the senses.
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