About all this powder room has going for it is its size – it’s LARGE . But it’s also BORING . Wallpaper adds personality and visual interest , and keeps the room from feeling too massive . In addition, the Brooklyn icons hold sentimental value to the homeowner . Here is the opposite corner of the vanity . AND the short space between the ” floating vanity ” and the baseboard. I was able to do this space fairly easily because, first of all, I’m small and can pretty much fit under there. But what really made this possible is that, once I knew what the pattern match could be to the adjoining wallpaper strip , I was able to pre-trim these six short strips horizontally at the point where they would sit above the baseboard . Then I trimmed their height to 4 1/2″ – the exact height of the wall space way under that cabinet . From there, after pasting , it was a (sorta) easy task to squirm under there and put the strips into place. Yeah – nobody’s going to see it. But the husband wanted the wallpaper to be under there. And you know what? Even if the homeowners had not requested the paper go down there, I would have done it, anyway. Because leaving that bit of wall uncovered would have bugged the heck out of me.
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Corner opposite toilet .IIconic scenes from life in Brooklyn , New York . The pattern is called Brooklyn Toile , and is by Flavor Paper – they are known for some unique and wacky designs . Some Flavor Papers can be very difficult to install . I pretty much won’t work with their vinyl , and definitely not their (or anybody’s ) peel & stick . But I do very much like their EZ Papes option . This is a thin , pre-pasted material that goes up beautifully , seams are invisible , not affected by humidity , it adheres nice and tight for decades , and will strip off the wall easily when you redecorate – as long as you use water and follow the directions . This brand doesn’t have a strong protective coating , and the mom has concerns about the three young kids touching or splashing the paper as they reach for towels or soap or toilet paper . So she’s exploring various alternative options for towel racks and TP holders . Like laying a hand towel on the counter top , and a stand for the TP, or placing the rolls in a decorative basket . Their wallpaper is packaged differently from other companies . Panels are 24″ wide x 10′ 4″ high, with two strips in a pack , or ” roll .” So the total width of a “roll” is 48″ (4′), and then 10′ 4″ high. So if you have 8′ high ceilings , you’re going to be throwing away 2′ or so with each strip. And for the areas over doors , same thing … a full 10′ 4″ strip will be needed, even if the space above the door is only 12″ high. There are a couple other companies that package similar to this, with Spoonflower , House of Hackney , and Mind the Gap being good examples. Fkavor Paper is also a pricey brand . But very worth it, if you want something fun and unique . I mean, these guys even offer scratch-and-sniff wallpaper!
Incredibly boring and blah powder room in a newish townhome in the Montrose area of Houston. Wow! Now THIS makes an IMPACT!!!This is not an Andy Warhol design, but it’s exactly like what he liked to create. Shot of mirror over vanity. Pattern is perfectly centered over mirror and coming down both sides.Lips! Pic is off-hue … The background is really a vibrant yellow. Rolling out the material. Each ” roll ” contains three strips, , or panels , each of which is 20.5″ wide by 118″ (just under 10′).The manufacturer is Mind The Gap , and the pattern is called Neon Kiss . This is a strong, un-tearable, stain-resistant non-woven material. It is easy to hang on flat walls, and you can use the paste the wall installation method. I usually paste the material , though, especially in bathrooms with vanities to cut around and toilets to squeeze behind. The substrate is soft and supple and easy to trim, and the surface is quite washable.
Powder room before.Powder room after the introduction of various bugs, insects, critters and creepy crawlers.The homeowner loves bugs. She likes this view so much that she said she might not cover it with a mirror. Who needs a mirror in a powder room, anyway?This powder room is under the stairs, hence the sloped ceiling. The wallpaper has the look of botanical identification prints, in a dreamy shade of blue. Mind the Gap is the manufacturer, and the pattern is called Entomology. The material comes as a 3- roll / strip set. It’s a non-woven product, so you can hang it by pasting the wall. Although I usually choose to paste the paper. Interestingly, this paper was lot thinner and crisper than the black Aquafleur by the same brand I hung a couple of weeks ago. In fact, it was quite translucent. I had to not make pencil marks on the walls nor on the back of the paper, for fear they would show through the front. This stuff is also very curly – meaning that it wants to stay tightly rolled up. Two days before the install, I asked the homeowner to roll the material backward and secure with an elastic hairband, to relax the curl. This worked wonderfully, and I had nice flat sheets to work with. The pattern is essentially a mural, spread across three strips that connect to the next set of three strips. The pattern does not repeat. That means that it takes one full ” roll” for each strip. Since the rolls are 10′ long and the walls in this bathroom were less than 8′, there was more than 2′ of paper cut off and thrown away, for each of 15 strips around the room. The two 8″ high strips over the door would also have each used up a full 10′ roll. But I did a little measuring and plotting and trimming and used scraps for this area. This also enabled me to put bugs that had not been seen on any of the other strips up over the door. Because this space was only 8″ high, I had to find insects that were small – didn’t want anyone to get his legs or antenna cut off! Sorry, I forgot to get a photo of that area. This room had some tricky spaces. Besides the sloped ceiling, which presented challenges of its own too complicated to delve into here, the 2″ gap you see next to the vanity in the top photo … the wide strip on the wall with the hand towel ring, plus the 2″ wide strip between the vanity and that wall probably took me a full 40 minutes to get in place. The townhome is in the Galleria / Highland Village neighborhood of Houston.
Re yesterday’s post, the large red poppy is a dominant feature in this wallpaper design, and could easily steal the show. I didn’t want it at the top of the wall, as I thought it would feel top-heavy. When the homeowner mentioned that she really loves the red flower, I worked to place it prominently. I found two heights that were aesthetically pleasing and alternated the flowers between the two heights. I also centered the flower in the wall space when possible, which you can see gave a very pleasing, balanced look. None of the red flowers was cut off by a door frame or molding. The short areas over the doors coupled with the vertical foliage in the design gave me a lot of wiggle room to fudge things and play with placement. All this plotting and engineering took a whole lot of time – but I really enjoy the challenge of it all.Gave the eye a break from repetition here by not centering the poppy. Aquafleur in Anthrocite colorway by Mind The Gap out of Transylvania.
This kitchen in the Spring area of north Houston suffered severe water damage from burst pipes during the hard freeze in February 2021. Nearly a year later, they are almost finished with repairs, including new drywall on bottom of walls, new cabinets, new plumbing, cabinets, electrical, and more. Here you see the contractor’s repair work on top of some of the original wallpaper, which dates to the early 1980’s! It was a good brand, and the installer did a great job. For various reasons, I opted to leave this wallpaper in place, and so skimmed over uneven areas and then primed on top of it with Roman Pro 977 Ultra Prime. The homeowner’s new choice is very similar to the previous paper, but with a more springy feel and a lot of upward movement. The area below the chair rail will receive another coat of paint to better define the correct yellow color. Or, the homeowner may switch to a green pulled from the leaves in the pattern.This wall with the fir-down / soffit was a real bugger, for various reasons, and took me about four hours.Looks so sharp against the white paint and tile!The wallpaper was printed on a white substrate, so I ran black chalk along the edges of each strip, to try to prevent white from showing at the seams. Still, some of the strips shrank just a half a tad, and that did allow some white to show. This wallpaper is a non-woven material, which has a high polyester content, and is not supposed to stretch or shrink, so this is disappointing. Pasting the wall and dry-hanging the material would have probably helped. But the material was extremely thick and stiff, and plus the room had way too many turns and bends and angles, so pasting the paper made the most sense. These gaps are very minor, and only visible when viewed from straight on; from an angle you can’t even see them. On some papers, I can pull some tricks out of my bag and camouflage them. But with this non-woven material, don’t even try anything with paint, marker, chalk or anything else – it will surely stain the material. The walls are smooth. The slight texture you see is the non-woven material. When an edge is torn, you can actually see the polyester fibers – a lot like fiberglass. This material is very strong, and is designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece when it’s time to redecorate. Manufacturer is Mind The Gap out of Transylvania (!), and the design is called Aquafleur, in the Anthracite color. The material comes as a 3-panel set, which they call one “roll.” The overall width of the A, B, and C panels side-by-side is about 5′, and the height is just under 10′. The height of the wall was less than 5,’ and the strips were nearly 10′ long, so at least 5′ was lost of each strip. Because the pattern was a mural type, rather than a typical repeating wallpaper design, even more paper was lost in working around the configurations of the room – for instance, a full 10′ strip would be needed to paper just one 9″ high strip above the door. So there was an incredible amount of waste – and this is a higher-priced boutique brand. But the lady of the house really loves it, and so she went with her heart.
Townhome’s 3rd floor bar / game room, with sample of the wallpaper to be placed here. The homeowner and I worked together to plot the layout. She had specific ideas about placement. So I positioned “the girl with the rays” (actually, her earring) smack in the center of the wall horizontally. Other considerations were taken as to which elements to place at the top of the wall.Close-upThis is the sample that came from the manufacturer. It includes a snippet of the design, as well as a shot of how it will look on a full-sized wall.This stuff is made in Transylvania!Mind the Gap is not your average wallpaper manufacturer!I love the little tags and inspirations they tuck inside the box with the paper.
The home is in the Midtown / Third Ward area of central Houston. The manufacturer is Mind the Gap, and the design is called “Other Worlds”. The wallpaper is made to order. It’s on a non-woven substrate.
I used the paste-the-wall installation method, but I think that pasting the paper would have worked better for this material, because it was very thick and stiff and unyielding…. difficult to work into corners and ceiling lines, and this caused it to crease easily. Pasting the back of the material would have softened it and made it more flexible and pliable.
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