“Almost” the Imperial Trellis Design

Digital Image

This is a handsome (and more affordable) knock-off, of a classic wallpaper pattern called the Imperial Trellis, that has been around for, well, for maybe more than 100 years. I have hung it in a number of colors, but this is the first time to do it in such a dramatic and bold dark grey color. Unfortunately, my danged camera ate most of my photos, including shots of some tricky and impressive measures I had to take to keep the pattern matched while dealing with some very un-plumb walls.

Here is the one shot I have. It tells a lot. This perfectly centered first strip of wallpaper took me about 40 minutes to hang. I had to find the center point on the wall based on the faucet (a pic of the sink and faucet disappeared – thanks, cheapie camera!) and the light fixture (you can see a photo of that), and then calculate how that translated to the placement of the pattern on the bolt of wallpaper, and then where I should line up the edge of the first strip of paper, so that the center of the design aligned with the faucet and light fixture.

That’s the Cliff Notes version – a whole lot more math and engineering and planning went into that first strip. 🙂

I hung this in the powder room in a new home of a young family in the Woodland Heights section of the Heights neighborhood of Houston.

This wallpaper pattern is by Ronald Redding, for York Wallcoverings, and was bought at a discounted price from Dorota Hartwig at Southwestern Paint on Bissonnet near Kirby. (713) 520-6262 or dorotasouthwestern@hotmail.com. Discuss your project and make an appointment before heading over to see her.

Multi-Colored, Finely-Textured Grasscloth in a Guest Bath

I definitely apologize for the dark photos – that’s what you get, I guess, when you pay $20 for an off-the-rack job at CVS. 😦

Anyway, this finely textured grasscloth by York Wallcoverings (#DV3840) went up beautifully, in a pretty complicated / chopped-up downstairs bathroom in a contemporary new home in the Heights. It took me nearly 11 hours to prime and hang the 10 single rolls of paper!

All the paper was the same run, but, to avoid shading / paneling (do a Search on my blog) as much as possible, I plotted the layout so all the paper on a given wall came off the same bolt of paper. This uses a little more paper, but it’s well worth it.

There was only one instance of paneling, where I had to use one short strip from a different bolt. But it was over a door near a corner, so not very noticeable. Most of the seams had virtually no shading or paneling, as you see in the photo with the towel bar.

I say the finished room looks like a jewel box, because of the jewel-tone colors and the slight sheen in the paper, and, as you can see – even in an embarrassingly dark photo – it goes magnificently with the black granite countertop and the multi-colored glass vessel sink.

The interior designer on this job was Pamela O’Brien, of Pamela Hope Designs http://www.pamelahopedesigns.com/ . Her style is elegant, but down to earth and easy to live with, plus, she’s a doll to work with!

Flaw of the Day – Bashed Edges

So I spent all yesterday and half of today smoothing textured walls in a master bathroom in the Heights. Primed the walls, then lugged in my table, 40-pound bucket of paste, tools, etc., then opened the rolls of paper to find this – banged edges. Come on, Brewster, just put a little bubble wrap in the bottom of the box before throwing it on the truck and into the hands of hasty and clumsy delivery guys.

This paper is thick and spongy, one of the new “non-woven” backings manufacturers are rushing to use these days. With a thinner paper product, minor bangs will often dry flat. But with this N-W material, the dents are here to stay. The paper also creases easily during handling.

Because it’s a shimmery finish on a relatively plain pattern, these imperfections will really show. I didn’t want to put it up, and the client agreed.

I feel confident that reordering the same thing will result in more banged edges and unusable paper, so I recommended that she choose something entirely different, preferably not one of those danged non-woven papers.

This wallpaper was from HGTV’s line, available at Sherwin Williams stores. The actual paper was by designer Kenneth James and manufactured by Brewster. Pattern # F66547.

Glowing Drain Pipe

You are looking from above at the drain in the bottom of a bathtub.

This 1910 bungalow in the Heights is set on piers 18″ or so off the ground. What you see is sun light reaching under the house and illuminating the white PVC drain pipe.

It positively glowed.

This was in a hall bathroom where I hung a trellis patterned wallpaper.

Wallpaper on the Heights Home Tour

I love home tours, and see as many each year as I can. And while I’m in the homes, I always scout around to see if they’ve used wallpaper. This year, two of the homes on the Heights tour had wallpaper.

One was a fairly contemporary home. They used a silvery grey blue grasscloth in the powder room. This had a fairly fine texture, and I didn’t notice any shading / paneling (see my previous posts). While I don’t recommend grasscloth in bathrooms due to its propensity to stain when it gets wet, it sure did look good in this home.

Upstairs, they had an accent wall in the son’s bedroom that was a very unusual pattern. Basically, it was blocks of color running in horizontal stripes. Some were squares, some were rectangles, and some were blocks that verticle stripes, but all were more or less blocks of the same size (about 5″ square) running in horizontal rows across the wall.

Another home had grasscloth in one of the rooms. I remember noting that it had thick reeds on it, and I thought about how difficult it is to cut those reeds, and how especially hard it is to get them to turn corners.

The master bedroom had wallpaper on the ceiling. It was a dark grey with little circles on it. The docent kept talking about how beautiful it was, and other tour-goers were ooo’ing and aaw’ing over it. But I kept thinking how it visually dropped down the ceiling and closed in the room, and how much prettier and more airy it would have looked if they used the same pattern but a lighter color.

Another home also had wallpaper on the ceiling of the master bedroom, and was also fairly dark in color. This time it was a textured paper, 5″ squares, if I’m remembering correctly, and had a fauxed finish glaze over it, to bring out the embossing (textured pattern). While I appreciated the worksmanship that went into the installation and painting, again, I wasn’t too keen on dark wallpaper on a ceiling.

Then again, interior designers seem to love the look, and plenty of homeowners like it, too. There you go – to each his own!

Norhill Home Tour Today – Cool Use of Vintage Wallpaper

I love home tours and go on as many as I can. (Eastwood is coming up next weekend – LOVE that neighborhood!)

Today was the Norhill tour, a pocket of the Heights just north of (and similar to) the Woodland Heights. I was surprised that NONE of the homes had wallpaper. Most of the homes were styled fairly true to their 1920’s roots (with updates for modern living, of course), and back then, EVERY room in EVERY house was papered. But all these homeowners opted to paint their spaces, instead.

However, there was one really clever use of old wallpaper that was uncovered during renovation of one of the homes. These vintage patterns are so pretty, and the colors hold up so well, they are just gorgeous. (I have a collection of all I can get my hands on.) Often, homeowners will frame thes scraps of paper and hang them in a room or hallway in the house.

But one homeowner took this idea a step further – She cut the old wallpaper scraps into the shape of butterflies, making sure to get as much of the pattern and color as possible. Then she took some of the old cheesecloth that was originally used to line the old ship-lapped wood walls to provide a base for the wallpaper, in the days before Sheetrock. She affixed the butterflies in an airy arrangement on the cheesecloth, and placed all of it between two sheets of glass, and finished with a simple wooden frame.

Just fabulous! I loved this idea, and so pretty hanging on the wall.

Coincidence of the Day

So, I’m at a birthday party last night, for the accountant gal who protests my home appraisal, Laura Mullen of Mullen Consulting http://mullenconsultingllc.com/.

We were standing in a circle watching her open her presents, and it was made note that I had wrapped her gift in wallpaper. Than it was explained that I am a wallpaper hanger.

Next thing you know, a gal who was sitting in the front row spoke up, “I live in the Heights, and we built a new house. You papered my bathroom, a black damask, just earlier this year!”

Small world!