Wallpaper Obsession...

I love wallpaper, I'm obsessed with it! I have added wallpaper to my bedroom, office, and livingroom. I don't like an entire room of wallpaper but I do like accent walls. It lends texture to any room and keeps a room interesting. In my bedroom I put grasscloth on two walls and it looks amazing with a great blend of navy blue, grays, and straw in the grasscloth. You can get grasscloth in many colors and you can even have it custom printed with a design over the grasscloth. 

Astek Wallcoverings can print a pattern over grasscloth. They used this in a bedroom on HGTV's Design Star. For more information on printable grasscloth visit http://www.astekwallcovering.com/

I used this in my livingroom in brown and it also comes in a beautiful Robin's egg blue, it's from Graham & Brown - http://www.grahambrown.com/us/index and I bought it through DesignYourWall.com.

It's easy to get completely lost in wallpaper sites like: 

http://www.designyourwall.com/ ...It's wallpaper porn!!!

Unfortunately, I just had my first bad experience with wallpaper installation. I searched and searched for a cool wallpaper for my guest room and found another great design from Graham & Brown. The paper had a mustard stripe with a blue gray stripe and a hint of silver metalic throughout with a small silver metallic pin stripe between each color. It was beautiful and I couldn't wait to have it installed.

My plan was to hang horizontally and the wallpaper hanger arrived to do the job but after her first 12 foot strip the wallpaper creased and the color was coming off at the crease. My paper hanger had only ever experienced this problem once in her career. With calls to the manufacturer and calls to the distributor we sadly determined that it just wasn't going to work and the paper was too fragile. It was a brand new pattern and it was batch #1 which might have been the reason no one else had ever had the problem. In the future I will stick to a more durable paper and preferably one that has some vinyl in it. If it says washable, it's durable.  

Grasscloth is a different story... it's not washable but it is durable and most paper hangers know how to handle.Check out Phillip Jefferies line of papers for some truly amazing grasscloths: http://www.phillipjeffries.com/index.html

I recently stumbled upon some very interesting paintable papers that lend amazing texture to a room. Graham & Brown have a modern version with squares that I really like.



Here are some wallpaper favorites available at DesignYourWall.com...

  













Some of my favorite paper comes from Osborne & Little in England:

 

Resources:

http://walnutwallpaper.com/
http://www.phillipjeffries.com/index.html
http://www.astekwallcovering.com/
http://www.designyourwall.com/
http://www.osborneandlittle.com/




Wallpaper takes time to find the right one but the process can be a lot of fun.