It’s time to put a bit of personality on your walls
Forget about the pale emulsions. There’s a strong trend on the way towards very busy wallpaper, writes .
Electing for wallpaper or digital printed panelling outside the infant quarters is a brave even maverick choice. It’s much easier (aka lazy) to slather up a predestined ‘collection’ of one shifting uptight taupe paint. Belted, framed, highlighted — polite metres of underwater emulsion are safe, calm and acceptable. I’m so, so bored, aren’t you?
Griege, scandi-chic principles have hounded colour out of lives. There’s talk of a return to ‘maximalism’ for next year, fussing up our indoor spaces with layers of accessorising, indicated homeliness and chintz throws. Instead, let’s ring the changes with pattern, light, and texture before littering those rooms with dust-drinking knick-knacks.
AW 2018/19 offers the chance to completely blow our aesthetic cover — leaving it all on the wall. Take a deep breath and think about patterned wallpaper or a made-to-measure mural — taking your taste, dreams, and distractions and writing them large with paste-the-wall choices that are easily changed.
This season’s new papers lead those teasing, quirky, eccentric, deliberately loud style stories to new extremes. The personality wall has fully come home, with content from vintage anthropology to kitsch ’50s fashions and steam-punk horror. These wall coverings work best where rooms are pared back to a few great pieces of furniture, allowing them full reign for colour and interest. Buttery leather, gemstone coloured velvets and the gleam of brass furniture? Ideal characters against taut, pristine new print to the walls.
Mind the Gap wallpapers made in Transylvania, Romania has found a rabid audience in both Europe and the US. Their range for Winter 2018 continues to focus on liberated twists and turns of the subconscious using photography, ancient illustrations and original graphic art. Head of design Stephan Ormenisan describes their mission.
We are collectors of feelings emotions and memories — emotional treasure that makes us feel alive
Bold, large-scale repeats saturated in detail and colour, offer a kaleidoscope of imagery from familiar iconography, to the truly, deeply weird. Choices flit from Marrakesh to Florence, through classical architecture, exotic habitats, the lost worlds of mythical legend and the curiosity cabinet of the antiquarian collector. You’ll find these wilder papers offered by all the major wallpaper/fabric houses. Visually exhausting or utterly irresistible? You have to decide if you can stick it. Go for smaller scale designs to quieten them down.
My five litres of wallpaper paste is on MTGs less psychotropic but delightfully different cultural appropriations. Dutch Blau is inspired by the indigo used in Dutch masters and Delft earthenware. Freshened against a white ground — calming, elegant. Their twirling Moustache papers — tickling.
Their Histoire de Architecture based on period drawings with fragile, fascinating sketches deliver a bookish, period feel. The Fabric collection is also more accessible, channelling the touch of silk, damask and cottons with a trompe l’oeil fascination. Mind the Gap is available to order at April & the Bear. Three-roll set 52cm wide by 300cm long which covers approx 4.65m2, €175, aprilandthebear.com (Crows Lane/Dublin). Full catalogue: mindtheg.com
Whatever the narrative in your paper, the general rules of pattern size and repeats apply. Testing with as large a swathe as you can coax out of the supplier is vital. Ravishing colour? Put together other paints, materials and furnishing ideas for the completed room to rough scale in a mood board.
Looking for a new colour to warm the season? Throw out your preconceptions of chill, and try out indigo blue. Pink has returned in a dusty pastel — mouth watering with the glitter of gold. Brands showcasing exquisite detail may offer three different rolls of one wallpaper to maximise variety in the repeats. Don’t reject the idea of a super-scale theme in the smaller room, even a deliciously dark one. The result can be surprisingly comfortable and high-resolution detail can also be ‘read’ up close in a smaller room.
Other full-on brands to explore in writhing, colour drenched imaginings? Extravagant or surprisingly demure, we’ve long loved the digital and hand-printed work of Paul Simmons & Alistair Mcauley of Timorous Beasties (Glasgow). Their lush florals, melting graffiti, ornithological and Rorshack ink-blot experiments are mind exploding.
For the truly terrified, try their online tool ‘The Room’ to pick and place anything from a gothic Bloody Empire to a polite Parisian toile.
Prices from €230 for a 10m roll with fabrics to match, housology.com. For bespoke, visit timorousbeasties.com.
If you’re hooked on our return to the expressive, decorative highs of the 1970s and even 1980s, pulsating geometrics are still holding our attention. Scion, Harlequin, Graham & Brown, Cole & Sons and many other paper houses have offerings perfect for that warming luxe-revival.
Bespoke Atelier (Glasgow) allows you to flip their designs roll to roll, or to hang the geometrics horizontally or vertically. From €180, housology.com. Pick the right vertical or horizontal rhythm to crank open narrow rooms or even visually raise the ceiling with your geos’.
To hit an art deco note opt for a metallic sheen, which will not only glow on a winter’s afternoon but will amplify all available light. An utter bargain, we love the angular gold framing in the new House of Alice line (Cubic and Zara Shimmer) from just €21 a roll at ilovewallpaper.ie.
Relaxed, receding botanicals (two colour cream on white etc) is a shy step into signature paper, and in bamboo — so wabi-sabi, another key Japanese trend continuing into 2019. They suit country house style as well as those metropolitan apartments weeping for a feature wall.
To dial up a more topical modern tropical — add shine. Palmaria from Osborne & Little, named for an island in the Ligurian Sea, has become a firm interior decorator favourite. Take a look through those large palm fronds on a mottled pewter, LA-inspired ground. From €74 for 10m, wallpaperdirect.com.
Graham & Brown’s paper of the year 2019 is Tori (bird in Japanese), a chinoiserie bird trail on a deep dark teal with heather, jade and damson detailing that embraces Japanese Kabuki spiritualism and movement. Pick up a colour in the paper, add velvet furnishing with brass bound tables — perfectly realised new opulence. Tori, from €57 a roll from all G&B suppliers.
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