Dramatic Background for Bathtub Wall Niche

An interesting feature to this master bathroom is this recessed wall niche . But you just can’t have a niche. You’ve gotta have something in it! The color scheme of this home is grey , neutral , and white . The homeowners were originally considering a similarly-hued nature – themed Chinoiserie mural by RebelWalls.com . But it wasn’t scaled to fit their space , and other factors weren’t feeling right.

So they opted for this instead. Way more dramatic , but still coordinates with the home’s color scheme . The branches have a light gold sheen .

Interestingly enough, this is the same paper used on the backs of their bookcases (see post a day ago). They realized there was left over paper , and it was enough to do the back of this niche. Win-win!

The wallpaper has a lightly textured vinyl surface on a non-woven backing material . I hung it via the paste the wall method . Non-wovens will strip off the wall easily and in one piece , with no damage to the wall , when you redecorate. The manufacturer is York , one of my favorites .
The modern / contemporary style home is in the Spring Branch neighborhood of Houston .

Textured Faux Grasscloth on Master Bedroom Accent Wall

Before. I’ve skim-floated the textured wall , sanded it smooth , wiped off the residual dust , and then primed with Roman Pro 977 Ultra Prime wallpaper primer . Now we’re ready for wallpaper !

Done! Just a bit of texture , and a little neutral color to add some warmth to this large , mostly-grey , master bedroom . Oh – and some subtle sparkle . See following photos .
It looks like real grasscloth . But it’s a faux! To help these homeowners avoid the disappointing color variations and low durability of real grasscloth , I encouraged them to consider textured vinyl products that recreate the look and texture of the real stuff , but without the drawbacks. Please click and read my link to info about grasscloth on the right of this page.

Real grasscloth , and the fauxes , as well, have visible seams (very minimal issue with the fauxes). So it’s important to balance the strips , so you have equal widths of panels as you traverse the wall. In other words, you don’t want five 36″ wide strips and then one 20″ wide strip.
And you’ll want to center those strips on the wall. Position them so you have an equal number of equally-sized strips on both the right and left sides of the wall.
Another design concept is to not have a seam fall down the center of a wall. Rather, it just feels better aesthetically to have the strip straddle the center line .
Here I’m hanging my first strip, having already calculated where the center of the wall is, the center of the wallpaper panel is, measured over to where the seam should fall, and then placed the red line of my laser level so it will guide where I should butt the edge of the wallpaper against.
That’s my Bosch laser level gizmo sitting on the top of the headboard, shooting its red light beam onto the wall.

Another shot. I’m using the vertical light beam ; the horizontal beam is not relevant in this install .

This textured vinyl material does a pretty darned good job of recreating the look and feel of real grasscloth . This photo is from about 6′ away.

A closer look. Note the bit of silver shimmer in the background , that adds a luxe look to the overall effect .

The wallcovering is by York , one of my preferred brands . It’s on a non-woven backing , which has many advantages over traditional paper-papers. It’s breathable , stain-resistant , will strip off the wall easily and in one piece with minimal / no damage to the wall when it’s time to redecorate .
It can be hung by the paste-the-wall method (which is what I did today) or the paste the paper technique (which I use most of the time).
I felt that the seams laid down better and had less ” rebound ” edge curl from factory trimming than many of the heavier vinyl faux non-woven backed materials I’ve worked with. In other words, I liked this product pretty much!
this particular material was also thin and flexible , so it was easy to work with and manipulate if needed.
The home is in the Spring Branch area of Houston.

Take A Walk In Central Park. Dinner Party Guests Chime In

Before. Most of this home is in the white / beige / neutral decorating scheme. The homeowner wanted something with pizzazz to snazz up the powder room. Textured walls have been smoothed, primed, and are ready for wallpaper.

Definite WOW! factor!

Toilet corner before.

Toilet corner done.

Another view

Close up.

Closer up. The textured background you see is the non-woven material this is printed on. It has a 20% polyester content, and is thus somewhat similar to fiberglass. Very hard to tear, resistant to stains , and designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece , with no damage to the wall , when you redecorate .
It can be hung by pasting the wall , or by pasting the paper . I generally prefer to paste the paper .

Rolling it out on the floor , to see the overall pattern , and to decide what element I want to place at the center of the focal wall as well as at the top of the wall . This pattern is so wild and crazy and over-all, that it ultimately doesn’t matter about pattern placement . That’s pretty rare .
The pattern is called Central Park and is made by Thibaut . The home is in the Galleria / Tanglewood area of Houston .
What’s very cool is that the homeowner had ordered large samples of three colorways , but couldn’t decide which she wanted to go with. So she taped them to the wall, threw a dinner party , and asked her guests to vote for their favorite. This bright and colorful one won, hands down!
Now she’ll have to invite them all back again, to see the finished room!
I think the color and the design go super nicely with the weathered-white , deeply carved front of the vanity .
installer installation

Fun Neutral-Toned Broken Lines Pattern in Pool Bathroom

Pool bathroom before.

Done!

Close-up. The paper has a light texture, which emphasizes the scratchy print of the design. It almost looks like someone dyed strips of tissue paper and laid them abstractly on canvas.

A Street Prints makes nice wallpaper, and this one was a joy to work with. It is a non-woven material. It can be hung via the paste-the-wall method, but I prefer to paste the paper.

This very contemporary new home is in the Hilshire Village neighborhood of the Spring Branch area of Houston.

Dramatic Update for College Age Girl’s Room

The furniture, bedding, artwork, wall paint, in this bedroom of a college-aged girl are all pretty neutral. The mother wanted bolden things up with a dramatic accent wall behind the headboard. This would be a surprise when the gal came home from school for the holiday.

One wallpaper choice was the Phillip Jeffries “Wish” wallpaper. Well, anything with that designer’s name is going to be really expensive. Plus the cost of smoothing the wall and hanging the paper.

Dorota Hartwig of DMH Designs (dmhdesigns44@gmail.com) found this – very similar pattern, but much more affordable price. It is by Wallquest, one of my favorite brands, and is called Dandellions.

In one photo, you see the paper rolled out so I can see the full-size pattern and determine how I want it placed on the wall, behind where the headboard will go.

In the last photo, you see a scrap of dark chalk which I used to color the white edges of the wallpaper, to prevent them from peeking through at the seams.

The home is in the West University neighborhood of Houston.

Three-Dimensional Square “Dots” on Pale Neutral Grasscloth

Thibaut’s “Union Square” wallpaper pattern is a response to the popular Phillip Jeffries’s “Rivets.” Thibaut’s looser design and pattern placement make it much easier to align with the walls and woodwork – including rooms that are out of square and out of plumb. Which is just about every house in every neighborhood in every state.

The 3-D squares are made of some kind of plastic stuff, and are virtually impossible to cut through with a razor blade or a scissors (such as when trimming at the ceiling door or window moldings). I was able to engineer the room so that I did not have to cut through any of those rivets! Because the PJ pattern is much tighter, this would have been virtually impossible.

Also, I found that my soft short-bristled smoothing brush worked well enough to press the material against the wall while skimming over the 3/8″ high square bumps (sorry, for some reason, the photo did not turn out). But my beloved plastic trapezoidal squeegee smoother was just about useless, because it would not accommodate the 3-D “rivets.” So I had to adjust my install tactics a bit, and figure how to get along without the plastic smoother.

This wallcovering is made of grasscloth, which provides the subtle texture that homeowners are loving these days. But because grasscloth is made of natural fibers, there can be a lot of variations between bolts, and even between strips off the same bolt.

For that reason, Thibaut not only notes the run number of a bolt of wallpaper, but also the sequence in which the material was produced (see photo). The idea is that if you hang strips sequentially, you will see less shading or paneling (difference in color between two strips of wallcovering). Thibaut’s insert also includes a LOT of jargon about the color differences inherent to natural products, and the admonishment to use the bolts and strips sequentially.

I used three double rolls / bolts of grasscloth for this entry. Two of the bolts (the first two in the sequence) were pretty homogenous in color. The room was small and had low ceilings, and so I was able to keep the three strips needed for the longest wall all from the same bolt (#1).

I cut my other full-length strips from the second bolt (#2). That left the third bolt (#3) for the many short pieces needed to go over the four doorways in the room. As you can see from the last two photos, even though it was the same run number and printed at the same time, this third bolt was noticeably different in color from the previous two. The background color is the same, but there is a lot – a LOT – more dark brown fibrous material that got worked into the woven grass material.

Keeping these darker strips over the doors was a good way to minimize this color difference. The strips were only 9″ high. If these strips had been placed side-by-side on an 8′ high wall, the color difference would have been abruptly noticeable.

Color variations are to be expected with grasscloth, or any natural product. But helpful labeling by the manufacturer, and careful plotting by the installer, can minimize these differences.

This ’60’s-era ranch-style home in the Briargrove neighborhood of Houston is very much a “sea of tranquility,” as the whole house is entwined in off-whites, creams, and tans, with various textures like rough wood, sisal, and this grasscloth, used to pull in depth and warmth.

The interior designer on this project is Layne Ogden, of Layne Torsch Interiors.

Wallpaper on the Azalea Trail Home Tour, 2017, pt I

Yesterday, I went on the Azalea Trail Home Tour, which is in the “toney” River Oaks neighborhood of Houston. Not many of the homes had wallpaper, but I was intrigued by those that did.

One home had paper in its powder room. It was a tone-on-tone neutral colored floral in a vertical pattern and a not-too-serious feel. What’s cool is that the pattern continued up and onto the ceiling. But the ceiling was curved, which is not conducive to wallpaper. And furthermore, the floral pattern went up onto the ceiling, but it faded out as it crept up higher onto the surface.

I looked and looked and studied that room for a long time – and finally realized that the wallpaper stopped at the ceiling line. The floral pattern that continued up and onto the ceiling was not wallpaper, but very skillfully painted motifs.

The colors of both the background and the flowers were spot-on, the artist had shaped the petals and stems almost perfectly, and had even recreated the thickness of the paint and the brush strokes used to make the petals.

It was an immensely skillful and artistic job, and was a real pleasure to see.

Ostriches in a Toddler’s Room

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Mothers love this cute pattern, and I’ve hung the pink version in little girls’ rooms and bathrooms many times. This more neutral colorway went on all four walls of a toddler boy’s bedroom. I love the way the color coordinates with the rich chocolate brown woodwork and ceiling.

This This wallpaper pattern is by Cole & Son, a British company, and is called “Ostrich.” It’s on a non-woven substrate, and is a paste-the-wall product (rather than paste-the-paper), and is designed to strip off the wall easily when it’s time to redecorate.

It was bought at below retail price from Dorota Hartwig at Southwestern Paint on Bissonnet near Kirby. (713) 520-6262 or dorotasouthwestern@hotmail.com. She is great at helping you find just the perfect paper! Discuss your project and make an appointment before heading over to see her.

Map & Anni-Mal Mural for a Baby’s Room Accent Wall

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Here is a neutral-hued, map-and-animal mural for an accent wall in a baby’s nursery in Baytown (a distant suburb of Houston). This is a new home, and the walls had the typical builder’s heavy-ish texture. I spent the first five hours of the day smoothing the wall. The prevents bumps from marring the face of the mural, and provides a smooth surface for the paper to adhere to.

I don’t know the manufacturer of this mural, but I am not keen on their quality control. As with the last time I hung this mural (exactly one month ago), the seams were not cut straight (see photo with pencil pointing to a jagged edge), and that resulted in some “gaps and overlaps.” The seams also did not lie down as nicely as I would have liked. (See photo) The paper did lie tighter and flatter to the wall as it dried, but the slight gap between the seams remained.

In addition, we had discrepancies in the size of the mural compared to the dimensions of the wall. Please read my previous blog post about this. https://wallpaperlady.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/soft-toned-map-mural-for-a-new-babys-room/ For any wallpaper project, and especially for something custom-made, like this mural, always have the wallpaper installer come out and measure BEFORE you order your paper.

In this case, the homeowner measured his wall accurately, but he had not realized that 2″ should be added to EACH SIDE to allow for trimming at the ceiling, floor, and sides, and to accommodate for unplumb walls and unlevel ceilings and floors, and the twisting and warping that happens to paper when it becomes wet from the paste.

The manufacturer added 2 cm to the mural’s dimensions, but this scant amount was not enough to camouflage the sloped ceiling line, so they ended up with a gap between the paper and the ceiling, that grew from 1/16″ to 1/2″ as the mural moved from left to right across the wall. The good thing is, the homeowner is going to install crown molding, which will cover this gap nicely.

This is an adorable pattern that is popular with mothers-to-be. Plus, the mural is printed on a durable canvas-and-vinyl material, that will resist dings, tears, water, and grimy little fingers. 🙂

Van Gogh Slept Here

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O.K. – maybe Van Gogh didn’t sleep here, in this brand new home on the eastern edge of the Houston Heights, but it does look like he spent some time painting on the walls. Oh, wait – that’s wallpaper!

This beautiful wallpaper is in the Van Gogh 2015 collection of a company called BN Wallcoverings, in the Netherlands. It was a thinnish, pliable, textured, paste-the-wall material, and was nice to work with.

The homeowner is absolutely in love with this pattern! The builder left the home quite boringly neutral – creams and beiges – and the homeowner wanted to interject some life and color into the master bedroom. Wow – this did the trick! The texture of the material even mimics brush strokes an artist might make working with oil paint on canvas.

This went on just one wall of the master bedroom, behind the headboard. On all four walls, this bold color and fluid pattern might be too much, but on one wall, it is super. For the windows and door leading to the balcony (not shown), drapes are being made that match the brown color of the tree limbs. Neutral-hued Roman shades will “disappear” on the small windows of this accent wall.  A few turquoise accents throughout the room (pillows, vases, artwork) will pull the whole look together.