The original dark paint was bold and beautiful. But the homeowners wanted something softer and textured. They listened to my “rant” about color variations in grasscloth (see link at right), and chose this embossed vinyl replica instead.
They couldn’t have chosen better!
We were worried about the usual very visible vertical seams in grasscloth, and how they would juxtapose with the vertical boards in the wainscoting at the bottom portion of the walls. The spacing between the boards did not sync at all with the width of the wallpaper. If the seams in the paper were visible and did not coordinate with the vertical elements below, it would have ended up a very visually confusing room.
Luckily, and very surprisingly, this material turned out to be wonderfully homogeneous, and the seams are virtually invisible.
What you do see is the is the very soft, muted texture and warm color that envelope the room. I like to say that this sort of pattern emulates a finely tailored man’s suit.
That last photo is distorted a bit, so ignore those wavy, swirly lines.
This wallcovering is by Warner, in their Textures VII, Grasscloth Resource book, on page 32, a lightly embossed (textured) vinyl on a scrim (woven fabric) backing, and is a random / reverse pattern match (meaning, there is no pattern to match).
It comes either 26″ wide or 52″/54″ wide. Lil’ ol’ me can’t wrangle that extra-wide stuff, so I asked the homeowners to buy the 26″ option.
This type of vinyl is way more resistant to dings and stains than most traditional wallpapers. The scrim backing also makes it easy to strip off the wall later, and with minimal damage to the wall. The embossing adds just a touch of texture.
Best of all, because it is man-made instead of a natural material, there is none of the displeasing shading and color variations that are so prevalent in real grasscloth.
The home is a relatively new build in the Heights neighborhood of Houston.
From flat and white to textured and black, this powder room took a trip to the wild and exotic. The embossed vinyl wallpaper mimics the look of crocodile hide.
I centered the design on the sink wall, so the pattern would frame the mirror evenly. Then, since the toilet wall is the first thing you see when you enter the room, I thought it would look nice to have the pattern centered on that wall, too. Usually, you can only balance the pattern on one wall, and after that, the design has to fall sequentially as it works its way around the room. But I did some engineering, and figured a way to place the pattern in the center of the toilet wall, too.
The material is an unusually thin and flexible embossed vinyl on a thin non-woven substrate. It’s my second time in this year to hang this, and I like it a lot – much better than most non-wovens, which can be thick and stiff and can bruise easily.
Non-wovens have some fiberglass in their content and do not expand when they are wet with paste, nor do they shrink as they dry. They can be hung immediately after pasting – or you can use the paste-the-wall method. Non-wovens are designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece when it’s time to redecorate.
This is in the SuperFresco line by Graham & Brown, one of my preferred manufacturers. You don’t need a retailer, because this can be bought directly from the G&B website.
The home is new build, contemporary in style, in the Montrose area of central Houston.
alligator installer
Top photo – you’re looking at a living room in a beautifully renovated 1910 home in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston. The bottom 3/4 of the walls are clad in beautiful white board-and-batten paneling. I skim-floated (smoothed) the upper 2′ of wall space a few months ago – and, due to construction delays, the poor family has been living with these uninspiring grey walls ever since.
Today I was able to finally get their paper up on the wall. This is an embossed vinyl faux grasscloth product by York. It is good quality, and the close-up shot shows that it does a good job of mimicking real grasscloth in texture and design. Unlike real grasscloth, because this material is vinyl, it will be resistant to stains. And because it’s man-made, there won’t be the sharp color variations from strip to strip.
However, like real grasscloth, this particular product does not have a pattern match (some by other manufactures, like Thibaut, do have a pattern match). No pattern match means that you will see a visible pattern break at every seam, every 27″ apart.
The homeowner knew immediately that she would not be happy with that. So she suggested running the material horizontally instead of vertically (called “railroading”). The width of the wallpaper accommodated the height of the wall space wonderfully, and we had just enough yardage to cover each of the four wall areas without having to splice any paper.
Another benefit is that, with the “grass” in the design directed vertically, it correlated nicely with the vertical paneling below.
And … the room has special tiny LED lights running along the top of the wainscoting. When turned on, they light up the wallpaper in a beautiful way. If the texture had been running horizontally, those lights would cast some really disconcerting shadows. (Remember when you were a kid and held a flashlight under your chin?!)
The true colors don’t show up well in the photos. This material mixes strands of murky blue, navy, mossy green, and gold. These colors coordinate sooo nicely with the deep blue ceiling, the navy paint in the adjoining dining room, and the tiles in the era-accurate fireplace.
The wallpaper manufacturer is York. The interior designer is Stacie Cokinos of Cokinos Design. She works mainly in the Heights area, and mostly on new builds or whole-house renovations.
One of the homeowners has familial ties to India, and he wanted their new home to reflect that feel. Presenting “Peacock Garden,” which perfectly conveys the feel of rural parts of that country, while complimenting the colors of their dining room.
This wallpaper is 54″ wide – which is about as wide as I am tall! Since I don’t have scaffolding, I used two ladders, set close together (not pictured), so I could walk back and forth between them to augment my wingspan.
The paper was untrimmed – had a selvedge edge that had to be roughly trimmed off by hand. Next, a perfect pattern match was achieved by overlapping the seams on the wall and double cutting – an industry term for splicing. The process requires special tools, and takes a good bit of additional time. Do a Search here to find related posts.
The material is a durable non-woven, which meant that I could install via the paste-the-wall method. Eliminating paste from the back of the paper made each 54″ x 10′ strip much lighter and easier to get to the wall.
The contemporary home is a new build in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston.
This wallpaper pattern is by Zoffany, and was bought from my favorite source for good quality, product knowledge, expert service, and competitive price – 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.
The owners of this new-build home in the Garden Oaks neighborhood of Houston knew that they wanted wallpaper in the dining room and powder room. So they instructed the builder to not texture the walls.
Well, as often happens, the drywall/paint guys didn’t get the message, so while they were spraying texture on the other walls in the home, they also textured the dining and powder rooms (sorry, no picture).
But – they got stopped before they primed or painted. This is good.
The textured surface had to be smoothed before wallpaper could go up. I’m quite good at skim-floating, and I quoted the homeowners a price for me to float and sand the walls smooth.
But the homeowner is also pretty handy. He opted to smooth the walls himself.
Since no primer or paint had been applied, the texture on the walls was raw mud (drywall joint compound). With no coating on it, this stuff is water-soluble. That means that the homeowner could simply wipe the walls with a wet sponge to remove the texture.
Well, it’s actually a bit more than that. You have to wet the walls well, and keep on scrubbing, to the point where the joint compound / texture softens up and can be scraped off the wall with a stiff putty knife, or scrubbed off the wall with a drywall sponge.
And that’s what the homeowner did. He did such a good job that he cleaned the walls all the way down to the bare drywall. That’s what you see in the first two photos. This guy was way more thorough and meticulous than any “professional” I’ve seen out there.
The best primer for bare drywall is Gardz (third photo). It penetrates and seals both the paper face of the drywall, as well as the joint compound “mud” that is troweled over the joints and tape (see white areas in photos).
So my task for today was not to work on smoothing the walls, because the homeonwer had done such a great job of that. OK, well, I did do a little tweaking in a few areas. But primarily, what I did today was roll on (and cut into the corners and edges) a good coat of Gardz.
Besides sealing drywall, Gardz is a good primer for wallpaper. So once the primer was applied and then dried (about an hour), the room was ready for wallpaper.
All-white is always boring, so the powder room in this brand-new home in the Spring Branch neighborhood of Houston needed some personality and warmth. The homeowner chose this popular “Priano” wallpaper pattern by Serena & Lily.
The pattern has movement, but it’s gentle because there are just two soft colors tightly entwined in a loosely repetitive pattern.
In addition to being pretty, it’s a lovely paper to work with, and it will hold up well in their powder room.
This home is a new-build, and the walls are covered in a fairly heavy texture. Since the homeowner knew she wanted the powder room wallpapered, she wisely made sure the builder did not texture that room. Because I did not have to smooth the walls, this saved her a day of labor charges.
Guys don’t usually get too excited about decorating, but this husband really loved the new look. They’re even thinking about doing another room! 🙂
No “Before” picture, because the wall started out just a boring white.
This is the fourth accent wall I did in a very contemporary new-build in the River Oaks neighborhood of Houston, and it has the least amount of color. So it fits the all-white theme in the home, and it lends a very soothing feel to this guest bedroom, which is used by the grandparents when they visit.
This wallpaper features a textured, embossed vinyl surface, with jagged stripes alternating between white and cream. Silver glitter worms its way along the stripes, lending just a tad of dazzle.
This was a paste-the-paper material, and there was no pattern match, so there was virtually no waste.
The paper is by Zambaiti, an Italian manufacturer. It was bought from my favorite source for good quality, product knowledge, expert service, and competitive price – 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.
Here is a brand-new, very contemporary home in the River Oaks neighborhood of Houston. The lady of the house definitely has a streak of glam, because there are touches of glitter, shimmer, gilt, mirror, crystal, pearl, and more throughout the house.
This textured, shiny gold wallpaper fits right in! I hung this on one wall in the entry of the home.
The material is an embossed vinyl on a non-woven backing, and can be hung by the paste-the-wall method or the paste-the-paper method (which is what I did). The instructions say that if you follow the directions in prepping the wall and hanging the paper, it will strip off the wall easily and in one piece when it’s time to redecorate.
This design is by Deiter Larger, and is made by Marburg, a German company, and distributed by Sancar in New York City. It was bought from my favorite source for good quality, product knowledge, expert service, and competitive price – Dorota Hartwig at Sherwin-Williams in the Rice Village, (713) 529-6515. She is great at helping you find just the perfect paper! Discuss your project and make an appointment before heading over to see her.
Digital Image
Digital Image
Digital Image
Digital Image
Digital Image
This is a dramatic wall full of color and whimsy. The manufacturer is Walnut. The paper had to be hand-trimmed, to remove the selvedge edge, which is an exacting and tedious process. See photo.
Aside from the crazy pattern match (see other post), this wallpaper was a joy to work with, and it will hold up nicely in the bathroom environment.
The Wallpaper Lady's Blog 