Phillip Jeffries Flight in Blue Heron in Heights Dining Room

Before shot of dining room in a beautifully restored and enlarged 1925 bungalow in the Heights neighborhood of Houston.
Just below dead center of photo, under the stairs – my helper couldn’t be less interested!

Swooping heron , and powerful , roiling, turbulent clouds .

This is a manila hemp product , which is similar to grasscloth , and has a texture d surface . As with most natural materials , the seams are always a bit visible .

The walls in this home were smooth , so no call for skim-floating or sanding … Just a primer was needed . My favorite primer for wallpaper is Roman Pro 977 Ultra Prime .

This wallpaper comes in panels , and is custom made to order . All of the panels are rolled up into one long bolt , and you have to separate them, as you see here. AND keep them in the correct order / sequence ,

I was lucky that this house had a lot of open floor space , where I could roll out the panels to verify pattern match, panel sequence , and get accurate measurements.
Note that, like many high-end brands, this wallpaper comes with an unprinted selvedge edge , that has to be trimmed off by hand . Once I get the edges trimmed off , the birds you see in the photo above will match perfectly .

I trim against this Big Blue straightedge , and hold a single edge razor blade in my hand .

Sorry, I don’t know how to flip this photo. WordPress used to be easy to work … but some years back they came up with this ” New Editor ” which is, to be honest, a nightmare, and costs me a lot of time every evening.
End of rant. Here is a mock-up provided by the manufacturer , that shows the mural as a six- panel set , including pattern layout and dimensions of each panel .

Here are my drawings from when I first consult ed with the homeowner and we plotted out how the paper was to be install ed. Phillip Jeffries is expensive stuff!
Normally, with a mural , a full-height panel is required for even the 6″ high areas over the door ways. See photo below. This means that you’re paying for a lot – a LOT – of wallpaper that gets cut off and thrown into the trash.
But, since the panels are about 2′ taller than the walls , we figured that the part cut off the bottom of each strip could be used for the areas over the doorways (see next photo) , as well as above and below the windows (see last photo).
This will take no small amount of math and engineering , and the couple will have to live with some paneling / shading , and color variations between strips . But that’s typical of grasscloth type products , anyway. Accepting a few color differences will save this couple a few – thousand – dollars. Yes, I told you that PJ was expensive stuff!
And I’m up for the challenge !

Here’s the one area I’ve done so far, using scraps discarded from the bottoms to piece in over the top of the entryway . This area is only 6″ high , so color variations won’t be very noticeable . Still, it really turned out well.

Getting a similarly pleasing look on this wall , with heights over and under the windows being much higher than 6″ , will be tomorrow’s challenge. Stay tuned!

A Grown-Up Girlie Wonderland

Please see yesterday’s post for the “before” photo. Here’s the master bedroom suite all finished. There’s a dramatic feature / accent wall behind the headboard with Rifle Paper ‘s beloved Peacock pattern . On the remaining three walls is Rifle Paper ‘s Garden Party Trellis .

RiRight side of the room. The homeowner is a single gal , and she wanted her master bedroom to be a relaxing retreat , but with a distinct feminine edge . Well – here you’ve got it!!

Left side of the room.
Look here, and at the photo above, and you’ll see how nice this uniformity looks. It was tricky! See subsequent blog post for info on how I did this.

Window wall – which took me five hours, BTW! She’s going to add window treatments that will be feminine – but the exact choice remains to be unveiled.

I pulled some tricks to get the flowers centered down the middle of the window columns. See a following post to see how I did this.

Pattern nicely centered on closet wall.

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Another nicely centered section of wall.

Close-up. This pattern is just fun. I like to say that it looks like the flowers are smiling .

Closer-up.

The homeowner loved the ” column ” look of the vertical pattern . The pattern is called Garden Party Trellis , and is a companion to the very popular original Garden Party made by this company Rifle Paper . Which is made by York. Many Rifle Papers are printed on the non-woven / paste the wall material, which has many advantages – stain-resistant, dimensionally-stable , strong, strips off the wall easily and in one piece when you redecorate later.
But this turned out to be a traditional paper type wallpaper – still good stuff, but a different material that calls for different installation techniques and time frame. I will note that the website stated that this was a nonwoven substrate . I encountered this conflicting information several times lately, so, despite what the on-line specs say, be prepared for any type of install scenario.
This is a new home in the Rice Military area of Houston.

Geometric Grasscloth in Home Gathering Area

No, this large room with sink and counters isn’t a kitchen. The family loves to entertain both family and friends, so included this “bonus” room in their new home’s plans. It’s used for both entertaining and crafting.
The wall facing you was originally painted a semi-gloss navy blue. In the photo, I’ve applied my wallpaper primer.
It will adhere to the glossy paint, and provide a matt finish for the wallpaper paste to grab ahold of.

Taking measurements and plotting the layout.

This paper has a selvedge edge , which has to be trimmed off by hand with a straightedge and razor blade. The manufacturer has not provided trim guide marks , so I am using a ruler and my eye.

The new look is so dramatically different I couldn’t resist taking a photo mid-hang. As you can see, I’ve used dark paint to stripe under where the seams will fall, to prevent any of my primer from showing through at the seams.
You can see the ceiling line starting to track upward on the right portion. More on that below.

Finished. Perfectly centered.

This is the mounting hardware for the big screen TV . I asked them to remove the TV, but we left the mounts in place. In order to support the heavy TV, they are placed quite securely into the wall , and I feel it’s best not to jimmy around with that.
Rather than have the first strip straddle the TV mount, I plotted to have my first seam fall down the middle of the wall, placing a seam in the mid point of the mount. This meant I had to hang four strips instead of three, but it made it a whole lot easier to work around the TV mount, as well as to keep the left and right edges of the grasscloth straight and plumb.

Close up showing the texture of this grasscloth material. It’s atypical to have grass cloth printed with a pattern , and I rather like the way the ink looks somewhat scratchy against the rough background.

Because it’s Schumacher, you can expect printing defects . The slight pattern match doesn’t bother me, as there were many more places along each strip that matched up perfectly. Nor do I mind the different intensity of ink on the two strips. That’s all part of the look of grasscloth.
But I wasn’t pleased with the white ink out in the middle of nowhere, as seen about 1//3 down the center of the picture. This isn’t considered a defect , and from a distance it’s not really noticeable. But it bugged me.

So I used some water-based paint and a very small brush from the craft store and lightly touched up the spots.

I also softened the mis-matched edges a bit. There’s a fine line between covering the white spots and staining the material, so use a light hand. And never permanent ink or oil-based markers or pastels.

Likewise, the ceiling line was not level, so as I moved from the mid-point out to the right, the ceiling rose above the geometric motif’s top edge, and a white line began to be visible, but only to the right of the centerpoint.

So I used the black paint to cover up that extra bit of white. This increases the width of that horizontal navy blue line from 1/4″ to about 1/2″. But from down on the floor you can’t tell, and it looks a whole lot better than having white on the right side and none on the left.

The brand is Schumacher and the home is in the Garden Oaks / Oak Forest area of Houston.
The interior designer who came up with this bold and lively look is Clayton Brooks .