After a few years in the wilderness, wallpaper has made a bit of a comeback, with a whole new purpose. It’s no longer a case of finding a paper you can live with for the next decade or so, there’s an art to selecting your ideal hangings and working out where to hang them.
You have to match the paper to the room
Bold geometric patterns with or without metallic highlights will give a space a contemporary look and feel. Think about some high-gloss finishes that make the wallpaper look more like tiling.
If you’re a more traditional sort of soul, you’ll need to coordinate your paper with the rest of the style of the room and house, adding in stripes or intricate patterns.
For a more casual or even fun sort of look, you can choose messy-looking florals or similar flowing, bold designs, or even use paper with a false finish to look like beading.
For a bedroom, you might want a romantic, soft sort of look, so damasks and florals are best. Aim for muted shades or pastels.
How to use your wallpaper
Once you’ve chosen the design, you need to work out how you plan to use the wallpaper.
You can cover all four walls for a classic look, but it’s best to do this only if you have a muted sort of design. If you use a large floral print on all walls, it’ll be overwhelming.
You could, on the other hand, pick out a feature wall to paper instead. This is where you can use a bold, striking or glamorous paper to make it stand out but not dominate the space.
One handy tip…
If you’re a wallpaper newbie, then it’s best not to choose very small patterns because this can make it harder to match up the rolls to maintain these patterns.
Flat or textured?
This up to you, of course, but a textured wallpaper has a warmer, more casual feel to it and flat paper looks more traditional and refined. Textured papers are also handy for covering up an imperfect or uneven wall; if you’re planning to use flat wallpaper on a less-than-perfect surface, you should use a lining paper underneath it first.
Buying enough wallpaper
You should measure all the walls and multiply the height by the width for the square footage, then measure the doors and windows and deduct their area from the total.
When you go to buy your rolls, note how many square feet one roll covers and buy the right number plus one spare roll. If you can, make sure all the rolls are from the same production run to avoid slight variations in shade; you can check this by looking at the batch number on each roll. If you don’t need the extra roll after all, you can always return if it’s unopened.
