Bright Colorful Wildness On Bedroom Accent Wall

Textured wall has been skim-floated, sanded smooth, primed, and ready for wallpaper.

Done!

Here’s how we got there …. First, this is a non-woven , paste-the-wall material. It’s nice paper, but very stiff and wants to remain curled up. So to get it to cooperate, after cutting my strips, I roll them backward, backing side facing out, and secure with an elastic hairband.
This helps get rid of the curl, and also ensures that when I’m on my ladder at the wall and unroll the strip, the face will not bump into the pasted wall.

After finding the mid point of the wall, and the center of the wallpaper pattern (beware – it’s usually not perfectly in the center or at the edge of the paper), I draw a plumb line (or use my laser level) and hang the first strip against it.
It’s important to start in the middle, first to get the pattern centered.
Next, because ceiling lines are never perfectly level, the pattern can start to go off-track as it moves across the wall. Meaning, the motif I placed at the tip of the wall may start drifting up or down.
By starting in the middle and working outward, any drifting is lessened because it’s split between the right and left sides of the wall.

Close up.

Called Amazon , this is by Clarke & Clarke, in their Animalia line. I hung some very colorful zebras from this same company just a few weeks ago – go Search and find the photos!

Matching pattern on the throw pillow, and a bolster pillow in the same colors against the white bedding really pulls the room together, and gives the colors more impact. The homeowner dabbles in interior design , and has really put together a Wow Factor guest bedroom !
The home is in the Garden Oaks neighborhood of Houston . installer

Zebras Charging Through the Bath

This zebra-and-arrow pattern is very old, and very loved. Scalamandre has been making it for a long time, in many colorways. Most of those colors are VERY difficult to work with. You see, the inks, combined with the paper substrate they are printed on, cause the seams to curl backwards (because the paper absorbs moisture and expands more than the ink does). My paperhanger buddies across the country who have hung the red and the gold and the green colorways have had real struggles to get the seams to lie down and to look good.

To be honest, after listening to the horror stories from them, I would not have touched it, if it were a printed paper. Except my client had chosen a silver grasscloth overprinted with the zebras. Grasscloth presents its own challenges, but at least you don’t have to worry about curling seams. So I took it on!

Still, it took a LONG time, probably 11 hours to hang (prep was already done) 8 rolls in a hall bath. Like many high-end goods, this paper came with a selvedge edge, which had to be precisely measured and trimmed off by hand. And it takes a LOT more effort to cut through grasscloth than paper.

Flat walls went OK. But the material was stiff and difficult to work with when it came to trimming around decorative moldings. AND… the beautifully remodeled bathroom included a console sink with chrome legs with non-removable support brackets, plus the plumber caulked the escutcheons to the wall so they had to be trimmed around neatly. (Usually you rough-cut around pipes, and the escutcheons cover it up.) It’s a good thing I’m short, because I must have spent an hour cross-legged under that sink, trimming around the brackets and pipes. 🙂

In the distant shot, you see two strips side-by-side. Note that the color difference between them is normal, and considered part of the “inherent natural beauty” of the product. All of the bolts were from the same run (printed at the same time), and still a color difference is to be expected. In fact, this paper was pretty much made to order, and the client had to wait a good couple of months for it to be printed and shipped.

The homeowner said to me, “I know you don’t like grasscloth’s visible seams, and the color difference between panels. But I don’t mind at all. I love LOVE it!”

The manufacturer is Scalamandre, and I hung this in a bathroom in a darling, nicely-remodeled-but-sensitive-to-its-roots bungalow in the Museum District. The work was done by Greymark Construction, whose work I really like, and whom I have worked with for more than a decade. In fact, I did a job last week in River Oaks where they had totally overhauled the entire housee. Leslie King is the owner. Yes, a woman! 😉 http://www.greymarkconstruction.com/