The homeowners had this elegant wainscoting added to the bottom of their dining room when the house was built . But for seven years, the room was bland and boring . The new crystal chandelier adds glamor , but the room is still lacking .
Wallpaper to the rescue! Now there’s soft color and soft pattern . And a little gold shimmer !
I’m encouraging the homeowners to paint that band of wall under the tray ceiling a very soft aqua color, to meld with the misty feel of the wallpaper .
It’s a soft aqua color , but enough to stand out against the woodwork . Now you see the beautiful moldings and trim work . South wall beforeSouth wall doneI positioned the tree pattern to fall down the mid-point of this space between the two windows . This shot with the chandelier dimmer turned down allows you to see the pattern more fully.
This wallpaper pattern is called Luminous Branches and is by York , one of my favorite brands , in their Designer Series line. The material has a slight raised / embossed / textured effect. It’s a non-woven product, so is strong , durable , stain-resistant , and designed to strip off the wall easily and in one piece and with no damage to the wall when you redecorate later. Non-wovens can be hung by the paste the wall method , but I generally prefer to paste the paper . NW requires no booking / soaking time , so they install a little faster , with no worries about shrinking or gaps at the seams . In fact, the seams are near-invisible . The home is in the Braes Heights area of Houston
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.
I hung this dramatic gold-on-black wallpaper about three years ago, and am back to do two more rooms, so took the opportunity to snap a coupla photos. Looks amazing with the black sink and toilet, and ornate gold faucet set. Plus the bamboo-look framed mirror. Close up, this material looks like embroidered stitching on menswear textured background. The glitter and shimmer adds even more pizzazz! This non-woven wallpaper is by Versace, and the home is in the Garden Oaks area of Houston.
Re my previous post about an under-the-stairs powder room that the homeowners attempted to install an argumentative peel & stick material … here is the finished room after I stripped off the P&S, smoothed the walls, and hung the new wallpaper choice. I engineered to place the sole philodendron leaf down the center of the ceiling. Where the under-the-stairs ceiling met the area over the door, the two surfaces came together in a very sharp angle. It was difficult to get in there and work, and to get the paper tight into the joint. Fingers can be too fat, so this is where tools can squeeze in there and save the day. This is also my kill point . Do a search here on that term for more info. A long story and maybe an hour or more of work, but you will note that there are no pattern mis-matches here. The homeowners were out of town, so I felt unpressured and could take as long as I needed to make these three areas look seamless. I love the hand-painted, water colory look of this pattern. This photo shows the joint where the walls meet the sloped under-the-stairs ceiling. A wallpaper pattern will never match perfectly in these situations. At first, I tried a few tricks to ” fool the eye .” But I decided it looked crisper and less distracting to just trim the two papers where they met. Here, we had the advantage that the tropical foliage pattern was busy enough that, I mean, really, when you step three feet back, who’s gonna notice a minor pattern mis-match, anyway? The pattern does match in the corners on either side behind the toilet, though (see photo). Even though this only 4.5″ high, it does lend subtle continuity to the room. When I see Candice Olson, I fast forward to glitz and glam and glitter and shimmer. Here her tropical foliage design is a bit more main stream. York is the mother company, and I love their products.
This home is in the Heights neighborhood of central Houston.
Just about everything in this gal’s new home is glimmer, mirror, crystal, and sheen. So no question that the accent wall in the master bedroom should be the same.
This design is printed on a pearlescent silver background, and features swirling dragon motifs made of tiny real glass beads. Viewed with light coming from an angle (window on the south wall, for instance, or a bedside table lamp), the wallpaper has a real glitter effect.
The wallpaper is by Osborn & Little, and is in the line by designer Matthew Williamson. It is a vinyl-covered non-woven material, and can be hung by either the paste-the-wall method or the paste-the-paper method (which is what I opted for).
The home is in the Braeswood / Meyerland / Braes Heights / Willowbend / Willow Meadows neighborhood of south west Houston. This area was heavily devastated by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. The home sits right on the Buffalo Bayou, and was built after that disaster, and situated quite high up.
Everything in Mom’s room has a bit of shimmer, mirror, crystal, rhinestone, or sheen. The little girl’s room is no different – except add in a large dose of pink.
So this pink damask wallpaper pattern with its highlights of silver glitter are the perfect compliment for two accent walls in her bathroom.
One was the mirror wall over the sink (not pictured) and the other was the recessed alcove wall behind the toilet.
This is an embossed (textured) vinyl product on a paper substrate, by Royal House. The home is right along Braes Bayou, in the Braes Heights / Stella Link area of Houston.
Usually, you expect Candice Olson wallpaper designs to be full of glitz and shimmer and glamour. In both theme and sheen, this one is much more earthy.
This is the main living area of a beautifully and respectfully renovated 1895 home in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston. Like most contemporary re-dos, the walls in this home are mostly white. The original-to-the-house fireplace was getting lost in that sea of white.
To the rescue comes this chocolate-brown wallpaper pattern with 3-D raised-ink impressions of Queen Ann’s Lace flowers. To keep with Candice Olson’s “glam” vibe, the stems are printed in gold ink. The dimensional quality of the ink syncs with today’s trend toward textured materials.
The dark hue really makes the fireplace stand out, yet the white flowers keep the look from being foreboding, and tie into the white used in the rest of the room.
I love the way the nature design and earthy color add an organic element to the room.
This wallpaper is made from a very sturdy non-woven material, which has a high fiberglass content. In fact, you could readily see the fibers, especially when the material was torn. Which was quite hard to do, because one selling point of the non-woven materials is their strength and durability.
These papers are made to stay intact and strip off the wall easily and in one piece, when it’s time to redecorate. They also do not expand when wet with paste, which means there is no booking time or delay between pasting and hanging. And your measurements will be accurate.
Non-wovens also offer the option to paste the wall instead of the paper. Although, in most circumstances, I prefer to paste the paper, for many reasons. Although this material is thick and stiff, it was not difficult to wrap it around the corner to the right in the photo.
The interior designer for this job is Stacie Cokinos, of Cokinos Design, and her jobs are mostly in the Heights area.
How’s this for something no one else is gonna have?! The homeowner of this Galleria-area home in Houston is a big-personality gal, recently divorced, and she wants her new home to reflect who she is. Everything in the house that could have glitter, shimmer, mirror, or glitz does – including the dog bed and the kitchen backsplash.
This wallpaper in the adjoining powder room (with a huge crystal chandelier!) fits right in with that new life.
This is a sort of mural, composed of rectangular panels about 3′ wide x 2′ high. It was bought on-line, and came with no information or installation instructions.
It was a paper substrate, and was meant to be butted at the seams, as opposed to overlapped, as many mural panels are. After experimenting, I found that a powdered wheat or cellulose paste hydrated the paper best, and that a little of my traditional wallpaper paste added to the mix helped hold the paper tightly to the wall and minimize shrinkage as the panels dried.
The paper curled badly when it was wet with the paste (see third photo), which made it difficult to paste it, book it, and then get it to the wall.
It also expanded a lot when it got wet – almost an inch in each direction. Uneven expansion meant that it developed large wrinkles and warps that were difficult to remove.
In addition, the walls were bowed and uneven in the corners, the walls were not plumb, the ceiling was not level, the crown molding was at different heights on different walls, and we didn’t have a lot of paper to play with.
It took a lot of work to keep the pattern matched as well as possible in the corners, to keep the pattern running at the right point below the crown molding, to eliminate the aforementioned wrinkles, to butt the panels, to minimize white showing at the seams due to the panels drying and shrinking, the paper getting saturated and tearing or dragging when I tried to trim it, and lots more challenges.
All this could have been easier if the manufacturer had chosen a better substrate to print on. But – well, hey, we’ve got a digital printer, so let’s just dig up some paper stock, print cool designs on it, and market it as wallpaper.
Actually, this material worked out pretty well in this small powder room. But I would not want to paper a large, wide wall with it.
Most companies who make murals like this, on this type of thin paper substrate, allow for the edges to be overlapped about 3/8″ at each seam. This allows the installer to make adjustments for wonky walls and ceilings, and it eliminates the gapping at seams as paper dries and shrinks. It does, however, leave a ridge along each seam where the edges are overlapped.
Overall, though, I was not unhappy with this product in this room. And working out all the challenges was mighty fun. I was glad to have a nice, quiet, empty house to do all this in. All in all, this medium-sized powder room that I had prepped the weekend before, took me nine hours to hang.
The owner of this new home in the booming Towne Lake neighborhood of Cypress (NW Houston) wanted to add some “funky French country” flair to the home. For the powder room near the kitchen, she found this swirly take on a classic damask pattern. It has a pearlized finish that adds just a bit of shimmer.
This wallpaper pattern is by Thibaut Designs, 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.
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.
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