Before. Walls painted with a deep, murky teal blue. I’ve measured the width of the border and then applied my wallpaper primer 1/4″ narrower than the border. That’s the white you see around the top of the room. I love the way the teal / blue walls coordinate with the green in the border (a tall , vintage border like this is called a frieze ). Painting the walls the same color as the border would have been too much, IMO. Plus, you can never get the color exactly perfectly the same – so it looks like what I call a “near-miss.” Better to opt for complimentary colors , as this homeowner did. The color in some of the leaf detail also coordinates with the avocado green in the adjoining living room – you can see a snatch of this color at the far left of this photo. The camera is making this color brighter and greener than it actually is, but you get an idea of the design . Once the Victorian era faded away, the Arts & Crafts movement came to be in the very early 1900’s , with less fru-fru and more nature , clean lines , whimsy , and stylized designs . The home also has furniture and decor that hark back to this time period . The pattern is called Apple Tree Frieze , and comes in several colorways . The manufacturer is Bradbury & Bradbury , in California. They are the go-to company for 19th & 20th century historic patterns . Delicious stuff on their website! Bradbury can be tricky to install, so not for novices . Different colorways can call for different adhesives / pastes , so be sure to read the instructions before starting . The bungalow home in the Houston Heights dates to 1920 (possibly earlier) which is just smack in the middle of the Arts & Crafts decorating style . I hung another period-correct border in this room for this family 10 years ago. Now they’ve done some updating with new colors and, of course – a new wallpaper border frieze . It was a pleasure to be back and help bring new life to the place!
Deep green wainscoting at the bottom, and on the right is a 100 year old ” dry sink ” with coordinating colored tile backsplash turned into a vanity, with period-appropriate faucet . Fresh and lively . But can you believe the design dates back about 100 years ? – same as the house! Close up. Looks like watercolor paint . Birds , butterflies , plants , flowers , and grasshoppers !C.F.A. Voysey is a male designer who worked around the turn of the last century, late 1800’s through about the 1920’s , and was part of the Arts & Crafts decorating movement . Most of his patterns are somewhat symmetrical , as well as whimsical and fanciful , with heavy emphasis on nature . This is a non-woven material , can be hung via the paste the wall method , although I prefer the paste the paper installation . It has a 20% polyester content and is thus more resistant to stains and humidity than traditional papers . And it’s designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece with no damage to your walls when you redecorate . The brand name is Lord Twig and it comes from Finest Wallpaper , which is in Canada. This went in the rear powder room of a beautifully renovated 1926 4-plex apartment that has been artfully converted into a single family home , in the Woodland Heights area of Houston .
Here’s an unusual but clever use of under-the-stairs space. It’s a series of three rooms, pretty much intended for storage / closet area. The height of the walls gets shorter / lower as you move further under the stairs. The homeowners decided to use the outer / taller room as a lounge for their dogs. As you can see, plain old tile floors and wall paint don’t quite cut it … These pooches get their own room, complete with wallpaper !Looking from taller, outer room into middle and then into the inner, smallest room. Only the outer, taller room gets wallpaper. Lots of angles, under the stairs.2 1/2″ wide space between door moldings.I had fun choosing which part of the design to slip into this narrow area, to ensure we’d see the most dogs and with the least parts cut off.Design is called Doggies and is by Milton and King . They make really nice wallpaper , although some patterns can be tricky to measure for, so consult your installer before ordering. This is a non-woven product, and can be hung via the paste-the-wall method of by pasting the paper.
It’s hard to get a shot of this room, but here we are, looking from the family area through the entry vestibule toward the front door. The sliding barn door on the right leads to the husband’s home office. Here the walls are primed with my favorite Pro 977 Ultra Prime by Roman, and ready for wallpaper. Paper’s up! Lighting and shadows are playing across the walls in some areas. Opposite wall, west wall, primed and ready for wallpaper. Done!An interesting focal point in this room is this set of 100+ year old doors, reclaimed from a building in Arizona. The homeowner tells me that the door has been preserved from rot by the dry / arid climate in that state. The dealer stripped the doors of years of paint and stain, and shipped them in their most “raw” state. The doors were then fitted onto a track and hung to slide back and forth over the opening to the home office. I love the way the weathered wood coordinates in color and texture with the wallpaper pattern. It took a lot of measuring, trimming, engineering, and plotting to get the pattern so it aligned inside these two wall panels as if the pattern were continuing from the area outside the panels. Close-up of the wallpaper design. This material by Milton & King comes as a 2-roll set, consisting of one “A” roll and one “B” roll. This entryway took four of the 2-roll sets. Due to logistics, more strips from the “A” bolt were used than from the “B” roll. Another reminder to always buy a little extra paper. Milton & King makes some mighty fun wallpaper patterns. Visit their website! The material is a washable vinyl on a soft and flexible non-woven substrate. The material goes up on the wall like a dream, flexible and manipulable (is that a real word??!) and with seams that are invisible. When it’s time to redecorate, this non-woven material is designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece, with minimal / no damage to the wall.
You usually don’t wrap a strip of wallpaper around an inside corner. You wrap 1/8″ around, slit the strip in two vertically, and then apply a new strip overlapping that 1/8″. The trick is getting the pattern of that new strip to match up with that on the original wall. And it helps if the walls are straight and plumb. Here I’ve done a great job of matching the pattern in the corner. This is the top 2/3 of the wall.But, as you move down the wall, it becomes quite evident the wall isn’t plumb. In fact, this wall had an actual bow in it, so it wasn’t flat or straight, either. So it’s impossible to avoid a pattern mis-match like this. The standard practice is to match the pattern at eye level. Then, as it moves up and down the wall, you’ve gotta accept any mis-matches that result. In this case, we’re lucky that the new vanity will block most of this. This is called Hick’s Hexagon and is by Cole & Son.
Porter Teleo is a custom-made, high-end wallpaper. Extra cool that it’s made in my home state of Missouri. So nice to see it getting exposure in Midwest Living (Jan/Feb 2022 issue).
Wish they had included some larger photos of the actual material, so y’all can get an idea of what their patterns look like.
Before.AfterThe colors coordinate beautifully with the deep blue/green of the wainscoting.I love these colors, and the soft matt surface.Manufacturer is GP&J Baker, a British company.
After 25 years in their Pearland (south Houston) home, the couple was ready for an update. Hubby got his new bathroom a couple of years ago. Today the wife got hers!
The room was ripped out down to the studs. Then they got new: deep soaking tub, shower with geometric tile, toilet, vanity with marble top, burnished brass mirror & light sconces, and … wallpaper!
I love traditional patterns like this. And the dark colors really stand out against the white tile and countertop and floor.
This is a non-woven (synthetic) material, and is designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece when you redecorate. It can be hung via the paste-the-wall method, or the paste-the-paper technique (I usually prefer this option).
This is my second time to hang this “New Orleans Toile” by Katie Kime in a year. That company has a number of toile patterns that showcase various major cities around the country. These are the kind of patterns that you have to look at “up close and personal” in order to see all the antics going on in the design.
This came as a printed vinyl surface bonded to a non-woven substrate. It was pretty nice to work with. I’m not usually fond of vinyls. But, since the room had numerous corners that were not even approaching being either plumb or straight, the vinyl material ended up being relatively simple to make conform to these variables, and to ease out wrinkles. I was also able to work the edges so that the next strip of wallpaper could butt against them.
Hygge & West, an on-line company, makes some darling wallpaper patterns. But I don’t enjoy hanging their papers. Because they use ink that fight the substrate it’s printed on, which causes curling paper and “pouched” seams.
Some inks smell like moth balls, and those tend to cause the curling problems. What happens is, the inked areas absorb moisture from the paste differently from the paper backing (substrate). The substrate expands, and that causes the paper to curl backwards. The second photo shows an extreme example of that.
Usually, once the paste dries, the paper shrinks back and the seams lie flat. But you can never count on that – the first photo shows a seam that has been on the wall for an hour or so, and the green ink is still curling away from the wall. The tendency is to keep pushing the seams flat – and that can cause overworking of the seams, stretching, burnishing, or other damage.
It helps to lightly sponge the face of the paper with water before pasting the back. This helps equalize the absorption of water, and evens out the expansion rate of the wallpaper. Make sure there is paste all the way to the edges of the paper – but not past the edge or onto the surface, which could cause staining. And use a little less paste on the edges, so it will dry faster and grab onto the wall. It also helps to stripe the wall behind the seam with a roller of paste – not much, but enough to put a layer of paste onto the wall, which can be drying and tacking up, ready to grab onto the edges of the strip of wallpaper.
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