Add personal touch to your walls, floors
I AM so bored of looking at rooms that look like they were photocopied from a showroom floor instantly to the house. It’s spring. Be brave. Go large with some unexpected choices in the larger canvases of your home.
Floor, walls, ceilings and windows offer defined, symmetrical spaces to personalise with some laughingly easy and inexpensive decorating.
Modern stickers can be put up and pulled down at will, so it’s a useful piece of set dressing without a long-term year-long run on the production. Use imagery or script to carve out a function area in a multi-function room, placing your sticker behind a sofa or desk for example. Pay attention to the character or form of the decal. Some pieces, such as a flowering bough can politely sway towards the area by being placed to one side without completely invading it, while others such as the Manhattan skyline perform the same work as a feature wall paper by virtue of their larger scale, so use them as a serious backdrop, taking your lead into a wider themed design.
To push the ceiling higher, choose a vertical design, and to widen the space, something in several pieces dancing across the wall will bring the eye left to right. Keep in mind, especially in the case of multiple words on the wall, that seeing the same motto however uplifting in the first weeks, can feel like a nagging voice in a very short time, where a silhouette graphic of an animal, iconic celebrity or amusing shape will please the eye for years.
At least make the words add up to something personal. Try www.wallstickers.ie, a great library of pieces from as little as €9.50.
As someone who doesn’t enjoy family photographs staring out from every surface of the house, the idea of having, for example, my pregnant abdomen blown up 100cm square and splattered all over the living room wall invokes a return to morning sickness. Celebrity culture, and the mobile snatched ‘selfie’ have led a charge to personal celebration.
If you feel you would enjoy subsuming your house in a bit more you and yours, digital photographs can be used to cover not just standard framing but considerable expanses of wall. Go completely pop-art and turn your head-shots into Warhol classics, symmetrical grouped for impact.
A frame free 100cm X 40cm is well priced at The Canvas Works, at €150 stretched over canvas, with cheaper choices in straight photographs and their wide selection of generic landscapes and imagery. www.thecanvasworks.ie. Cork: 021-4700972.
The end result of any digital print will only be as good as the original photograph. Shoot in a high resolution (as many Mbs as your camera will support). If you’re not using a flash, stand with your legs well apart to form a human tripod and cup a smaller camera in the hand, depressing the shoot button on the bottom of your breath.
If you look closely— yes, there they are! The faint ghost waving through the crisp white paint of the wispy ivy leaves you stencilled around the kitchen walls in 1989. Why do most stencils look so awful? Well, many of the themes have simply dated (bunches of Mediterranean grapes lapping your ears in the laundry room — oh dear) and secondly, the harsh truth is that most of us are not great at free hand painting. Stick to a more determined graphic rather than a literal picture of something.
Going off palette and applying extra paint effects requires two essentials. One is a good trial run. Take a good length of lining paper intended for wallpaper and paint up a scale version of your vision. Use some blue painters tape and set it up on the wall/floor/ceiling and see what it actually looks like. The second thing is accuracy. Even if you’re trying your hand at a loosely painted border on a hard floor, the rough direction you’re going should be intended.
Measure and pencil out your direction of flight, the width of any borders, stripes or zig-zags, and measure twice, paint once.
Painted runners and rugs can be fantastic, but be generous in the areas of colour (small motifs can be reduced to cornflakes at a few metres distance) and refer back to your mood board before slapping up the scheme.
If you’re determined on stencils, fight your way out of the 80s Art Nouveau revivalism and take a look at The Stencil Studios offerings of VW Camper Vans (€12.73) and Funky Flowers, in large blooms ideal for blotting up a wallpaper look (from €8.76). www.thestencilstudio.com
Sheers might seem the best way to shroud a deadly view or add privacy to a window, but take a look at the latest window films over the usual lacy veils. I would fight shy of faux stained glass choices which don’t sit up as a leaded or even acid washed original.
For etched glass effects, film is remarkably convincing as it’s bonded closely against the window or glazed panel of a door. With areas of cut-outs on the design in a range of opacities, you can use the light and colours of the view by day to highlight the tracery of abstract pattern or objects in the film. The piece can be re-sized to the exact specifications if you need for example a border included or a specific colour. Go beyond a repeat pattern and look at the nature inspired films from Purlfrost, ideal for completely or partially covering a bathroom or kitchen window in a landscape of trees, flowers and drifting insect life. The self adhesive vinyl is easy to apply using soapy water and a squeegee.
Soapy water and careful scoring into easily manageable strips is generally enough to remove the film too. From €54 per sq m. www.purlfrost.com
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