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.
This nicely renovated bungalow in the Houston Heights had a 3-room suite in the rear of the house. Included were a mud room, a walk-in pantry, and a vestibule leading to the kitchen. This photo shows the mud room before wallpaper. The paper will be installed above the wainscoting. The mud room finished. I plotted so the trees would land evenly balanced (centered) on the wall.Pantry beforePantry afterFrom kitchen looking through vestibule into mud room, before.Same area finished. A very, very cool 3-dimensional affect!Another view of the mud room. The blue colorway of the wallpaper works beautifully with the khaki color of the woodwork. The vestibule had four doors, and thus four areas in between the doors. In the two larger spaces, which flanked the pantry door, I futzed with the width of the strips so that I could place the trunk of the tree down the center of each space. I didn’t want all four areas to have the tree down the center, so in the third I let the pattern fall as it would, which placed the tree trunk to the left of center. This was a softer look. Sorry – no photo. The fourth space was only about 6″ wide, and the tree trunk would be much too distracting here. So I again manipulated the width of the strips so that only foliage showed between the door moldings in that last space. Sorry – no photo.Close upThis very popular pattern is called Raphael and is by Sandberg, a Swedish company. Their papers are quite nice. They are on a non-woven material. There are quite a few advantages to these non-wovens, both while working with them and after they are up on your wall.
You can almost see the gnomes and fairies peeping their eyes out from behind the trees and hillocks in this very fanciful wallpaper pattern.
And, no, it’s not a kid’s room – it’s an accent wall in the master bedroom of a new contemporary styled home in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston.
The homeowners wanted the room to be dark, to encourage a good night’s sleep. The two flanking walls were painted a medium-deep green, while the TV wall (opposite the bed) is white.
There is a small vestibule leading from the hallway to this bedroom, and the homeowner is considering painting this a lime or olive green, pulled from one of the colors in the wallpaper.
I suggested taking a section of the left-over wallpaper and framing it. The black and very dark greens would sure pop out against the lime green walls… especially if it were wrapped in a raspberry colored metal frame! There are a few touches of this accent color in the berries on one of the trees in the design. What a perfect way to pull the two areas together!
The photos make the wallpaper look a little more blue than it really is … in reality, there are more greens in multiple hues than blues.
This wallpaper pattern is by Cole & Son, one of our well-established British brands.
It is on a non-woven substrate, designed for easy installation and removal. I hung it using the paste-the-wall method.
This paper 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.
A distant shot to show you the warmth, and a couple of close-ups to show the texture.
This wallpaper went on all walls of a small vestibule leading into a master bedroom, and then on the headboard wall of the bedroom itself. The remaining walls were painted a coordinating grey color.
This is a thick textured vinyl material on a woven fabric (scrim) backing. Unlike most wallpapers, this is quite durable and stain-resistant – it’s the same type of stuff they use in hotels and hospitals, where it’s going to get banged into by carts and washed every now and then.
It is also extremely heavy. I’m betting that each double-roll bolt weighed at least 15 pounds. I could barely carry three at a time. A pasted strip 9′ long took about all my strength to lift higher than my head and position on the wall (while balancing on a ladder!).
Because it is so thick, it was hard to press tightly against the wall/ceiling junctions, so it took a little work to get a nice, tight cut. It was also difficult to cut through, so I had to press really hard, and went through a lot of razor blades, and still had to use my scissors to finalize some of the cuts, particularly to cut through some of the string backing.
My shoulders and arms are sore!
This embossed, textured pattern made a lovely, soft backdrop to the bed, and added a warmth that the paint alone could not.
The manufacturer is Thibaut. The older home has been beautifully enlarged and updated, and is in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston. The interior designer is Stacie Cokinos, of Cokinos Design.
Here is a small vestibule (the second vestibule I’ve done this week! 🙂 ), that leads from the living room past the powder room and into the kitchen / great room, in a newish “tall skinny” home in the Houston Heights.
It’s the perfect place to add a little personal flavor. This map pattern in muted colors is perfect for this space, because, in the adjoining living room, the homeowner has some framed maps that mirror the style and color of this wallpaper. The wallpaper pulls everything together.
This wallpaper is a non-woven material, and can be hung by the paste-the-wall method, or the paste-the-paper method. With the intricate door moldings requiring complicated cuts in miniscual spaces, it made more sense to paste the paper. It is by Mulberry Home (I gotta say – I think they’re knocking off the Magnolia Home brand made famous by Joanna Gaines on HGTV). It’s a British company.
The interior designer for this job is Stacie Cokinos, of Cokinos Design. She works primarily in the Heights, Garden Oaks, and Oak Forest neighborhoods. Her style is fresh and open, with attention to the homeowner’s personal taste, and a dash of fun tossed in.
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