Wallpaper allows you to customize a room’s mood
Returning design trend adds colour, drama or sophistication to your home
Are you thinking about adding a dash of colour or drama to your home? Or maybe you want to weave in a look of elegant sophistication? Look no further than wallpaper; this returning design trend may well be the answer to creating any look with ease.
“Wallpaper is great for several things — it creates memory points and it really sets the tone for the room. Plus, it can change a room so quickly, without adding a huge expense,” says Bridgett Jessop, principal at Debutante Design.
Whether it’s to highlight an architectural feature, to play off of a vaulted ceiling or to draw in a sight line, Jessop suggests using wallpaper in unusual ways to create visual points of interest.
“Feature walls, master bedroom headboard walls and powder rooms are really the most popular wallpaper asks from clients,” she says. “But there is always space to be more adventurous, and a custom wrap design really screams wow.”
The demand has become so great for custom paper that she often designs her owns murals and custom papers, recently launching a sister company to her design firm that specializes only in wallpaper — Designer Wallpaper.
In a recent design in the Springbank community of Harmony, Jessop swathed the teenage girl’s bedroom in a custom-designed swirl of pink graffiti inspired paper. “It’s a real show stopper. Every single wall is covered in this really loud paper. It’s fabulous,” says Jessop.
But wallpaper also has the ability to create sophistication.
“It all depends on the vibe that you want to create,” says Aly Velji, principal designer at Alykhan Velji Designs.
He agrees that wallpaper is a hot design tool right now.
“When it comes to wallpaper, anything goes,” he says. “You can really have fun with patterns, texture and colour. It’s a great way to incorporate something bold.”
In a recent home makeover in Lake Bonavista, Velji created a California cool vibe by using tones of navy blue throughout the home, and papering the powder room in a hand-painted navy-toned wall covering. Layered on top of that is art. “It can create a lot of interest and in a powder room because it is so small, you can really go all out,” he notes.
Similarly in a refurbishment in Charleswood, Velji chose a geometric wallpaper pattern as a textural backdrop behind the bookshelves in the home’s office to create a gorgeous dollop of design oomph.
“It really added this extra layer of pattern and colour and created some interest when we were styling the shelves,” he says.
Solid-coloured accessories were then paired in front of the paper, making them pop.
His design team is swooning over the Pseudo Sage wallpaper mural from Murals Wallpaper and the New Neutrals Lavish wallpaper from Prime Walls, along with anything that contains the on-trend colours for fall — greens, blues, rusts and butterscotches.
“We are loving these colours for walls because they are warm and inviting, and they also offer up something different in that they all work so well together.”