Not So Turbulent Storm Clouds in a Newborn’s Nursery

I’ve hung this pattern before, but in the more typical black-on-white colorway (do a Search here to see pics). This version, with blue ebbing to red, is softer and nicely suited to a baby’s nursery accent wall. The little guy was born just two days before this mural went up!

The design has a sort of scratchy pen & ink look that you only notice when you get close.

This product is not wallpaper with the typical repeating pattern, but a mural. Each bolt contains four strips, which combine to 9′ wide x almost 10′ high.

In the last photo, you see how the manufacturer has provided a mock-up of how the strips look and how they should be placed, as well as a picture of the overall design.

This wall required one 9′ wide 4-panel set, as well as two additional strips from a second 4-panel set.

The wall height was less than 8′, so more than 2′ of the height had to be cut off and discarded. The mother wanted to see both blue and red colors. So the grandmother (Mom was still in the hospital) and I rolled everything out on the floor to accurately compare the height of the wall with the length of the panels, and then determine how much to cut off from the top and from the bottom.

I tweaked the placement a little more, because I wanted to include as much of the clouds on the top far right side as possible, while still keeping a good amount of red at the bottom.

The pattern is called NUVOLE AL TRAMONTO in DUSK/PINK, and is by Cole & Son, a British company. It is printed on a non-woven substrate, which has a high fiberglass content, and is designed to strip off the wall easily when it’s time to redecorate.

N-W’s also don’t expand when they get wet with paste, which allows for accurate measurements. Also, it requires no booking time, so it enables you to use the paste-the-wall method – which is what I did today. No need to drag in my big loppy pasting table. 🙂

This wallpaper 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 home is in the West University neighborhood of Houston.

More Photos of Cole & Son Nuvolette – Storm Clouds

Finished the room today. It looks so good with the dark woodwork! A close-up is included, so you can see the scratchy “etched” appearance.

Powerful Storm Clouds – Cole & Son Nuvolette

“Nuvolette” by the British manufacturer Cole & Son is a very popular pattern – but not every room can handle such a strong design. This bedroom in a new townhome on the far west side of Houston is large enough to contain the storm clouds – which will cover all four walls. Talk about drama!

The dark floor and dark woodwork help ground the pattern. The homeowner has a background in interior design, and I can’t wait to see what furniture, bedding, window coverings, and accessories she outfits the room with.

The pattern match is very tricky, and you have to plot everything carefully and confidently before you cut anything. The product comes packaged as an A-B 2-bolt set. On the label it’s noted that one pattern match is straight across, while the next strip is a drop match.

So, essentially, this has a multiple-drop pattern match , played out across four strips of paper – but with even more complicating factors tossed in. It’s a real brain-banger to plot out! I’ve hung it twice, and both times was lucky enough to have a large open area where I could spread out the A and B bolts, and then plenty of time and a distraction-free environment to get my head around the pattern match.

In the picture, you just see a nicely fit-together set of panels. But getting them to that point did take a good bit of engineering! (Especially since “someone” opened the shipping box and removed several of the bolts from their original packaging, so there was no way to tell the A bolts from the B bolts.)

Like most of Cole & Son’s wallpaper, this was a non-woven material. This stuff has a high-fiberglass content, and thus does not expand when it gets wet with paste. This allows you to get accurate measurements that won’t change when the paper is pasted. It also allows you to paste a strip and hang it immediately (no booking time), and takes the pressure off of having a booked strip over-expanding while you fiddle with hanging a difficult strip.

It went up pretty nicely. Tomorrow I will hang the remaining two walls.

The pattern is in the Fornasetti line by Cole & Son, 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.

From Dark to Lightly Cloudy

I liked the original paper in this powder room of a newish home in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston. But the mom wanted something brighter and better suited to her young family. This is the second time I’ve hung this pattern – and the houses are just a few blocks apart!

This wallpaper pattern is by Eijffinger (an European company), and is quite likely a riff on Cole & Son’s “Nuvolette” pattern of roiling clouds. The C&S design is quite powerful, and needs a large space to play out. This Eijffinger take is much easier to live with, especially when it’s on all four walls of the room.

This is printed on a thick and spongy non-woven material that was flexible, and it was pretty nice to work with. I could have pasted the wall to install, but opted to paste the material.

Roiling Clouds Wallpaper in a Montrose Bathroom

Historic British manufacturer’s Fornasetti Line “Nuvolette” wallpaper pattern… I have long wanted to hang this paper, and finally got my chance today!

The walls in this first-floor bathroom of a newish contemporary styled home in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston were textured and covered with a semi-gloss paint. (top picture) It took me a day and a half to skim-coat the walls with smoothing compound, let dry, sand smooth, vacuum up the dust, wipe dust off the walls, prime, and let the primer dry. (second photo shows the smoothed and primed walls)

You would see this pattern better in a larger, less broken-up room, but here you can tell that it is a powerful depiction of roiling thunder clouds storming powerfully toward the west.

The product is unusual, in that it comes in a 2-pack set of “A” and “B” rolls. Each bolt is the same width and length as many Cole & Son papers. But the pattern is placed on those bolts very atypically, and the pattern match is equally unexpected.

Usually, wallpaper patterns match straight across from strip to strip. (straight across match) This means you see the same design element at the top of the wall on every strip. Or they drop down bit on every other strip, then pop back up to the top of the wall on the third strip. (drop match)

A much less common and much more complicated patter match is when the pattern motif repeats itself at the top of the wall only on every fourth (or more) strip. It can take a lot of mind-bending to figure out how to get the pattern placed correctly, and without wasting more paper than necessary.

Look at the upper left of the label, and it says that when placing the A strip to the right of the B strip, it’s a straight match. But when you position the B strip to the right of the A strip, it’s a drop match. This makes everything even wackier and more complicated!

What helped me here is that this home had plenty of room to roll out the bolts of paper, and plot out how the pattern would fall. (see photo) No one was home, so I had peace and quiet to concentrate and get my head around the intricacies of the pattern.

It turned out that the “straight match” indicated on the label was an error – no strips featured a straight match. Good thing I had all that floor space to roll the bolts out, so I could determine that.

Because the pattern match was so unpredictable, it was not possible to cut all of the “odd” and “even” strips ahead of time. And the very unlevel / unplumb qualities of the room also stepped in to make this impossible.

One thing that helped was that this was a non-woven material, which meant that the wallpaper did not need to be booked (left to sit and absorb paste and expand) before hanging. So as soon as I was able to figure out the pattern match for the upcoming strip, I was able to paste and hang the strip-in-hand.

If I had had to figure, measure, plot, paste, book, and then finally hang each strip individually, it would have taken a lot more than the eight hours it did take me to hang this 8-roll bathroom.

A big help on this pattern is that I belong to the Wallcovering Installers Association, and I check our Facebook page every day. (Sorry – it’s private … you can’t peek!) It was there that I learned about others’ experiences with this Nuvolette design, and how they tackled the pattern repeat and the install.

Wallpaper Gets Exposure in Magazines

Thank you again, Better Homes & Gardens, for featuring wallpaper in your magazine.

The first photo is a powder room done in “Nuvolette,” a rolling cloud pattern in the Fornasetti line by the British company Cole & Son.

Next is a hand-painted scenic mural, and think the brand was Gracie, although there are a few other companies that make similar. These are very high-end products, and this homeowner saved mega bucks by having just a few panels made, and then framing them and hanging as artwork (as opposed to papering the entire room with the mural).

Third photo is a popular foresty pattern by Hygge & West. They have delightful designs, but I am not crazy about their papers, because the seams tend to “pouch” just a little. Do a Search here to read more (upper right corner).

In the last photo, you see just a little wallpaper in the background.