Modern hang-ups with wallcoverings
Paper makes rebirth in home decor
BY REBECCA KEILLOR, POSTMEDIA NEWS
“It’s a far cry from being floral, Victorian, very heavy and matching drapes to the wallpaper kind of situation,” says Amber Kingsnorth, of Vancouver’s Mak Interiors, who has noticed a real uptick in its popularity over the past few years for both her residential and commercial clients.
“There’s lots of really great patterns and they’re very artistic and interesting, and it’s almost like doing a whole wall of art, but the price is way less than buying a canvas of that size. It really adds great texture, colour and dimension to a room,” she says.
Its renewed popularity, Kingsnorth says, is thanks largely to the way it’s evolved into design materials that people can really put their stamp on. For some of her commercial clients, Kingsnorth has designed wallcoverings that incorporate their branding elements.
“There is great, high-quality printing that you can get done for very reasonable prices,” Kingsnorth says. “You can create your own patterns, have them printed and put it up yourself.”
Which is exactly what designer Bertjan Pots had in mind when he produced his potato print design for the October 2009 issue of Apartamento magazine, offering people a DIY wallpaper option.
“I thought maybe we could just make four prints that you put in a magazine, enlarge to a certain percentage (like A4) and print them out or just put them on a copier, which is mostly cheaper, and if you copy it on grade paper you can just wallpaper your wall with it,” he says.
Though this issue of Apartamento is no longer in print and has become a collector’s item, the Studio Bertjan Pot website still hosts the design in PDF form so people can download it and continue to have what he intended – free wallpaper.
“Design is always a mirror for what’s happening in the world,” he says.
Hanging high-end wallcoverings yourself is not something designers recommend, though. For these, professional installers like Juergen Wuerthwein are called in.
“Hanging wallcovering has to be meticulous in order for it to look good,” Wuerthwein says. “So when the layman or average homeowner tries to attempt it themselves, they may not know every step and the succession of every step and they may find themselves having to backtrack, but backtracking with a wet piece of paper and an open time for that wet piece of paper, it makes the whole process more difficult and then people can become panicky.”
As well as the number of tools required to do a decent job – a large table, glue, roller tray, brush, sponge, water bucket, ladder, blades, broad knives and seam rollers – before even purchasing the wallcoverings, there are tricks to the trade that the average homeowner isn’t privy to.
“You need to know if your ceiling is level,” Wuerthwein says. “If your walls and door frames are not level, you can’t really successfully hang a pattern and if you have a symmetrical pattern and hang from left to right, it’s not going to appear symmetrical in the end because you don’t know where you’re going to wind up on the right side.”
As wallcoverings are typically now used for feature walls in homes and commercial spaces, Wuerthwein says, it’s important they look right.
Good professional installers, he says, also deal with the headaches that come with faulty wallcoverings – such as problems with the print, how it’s cut and colour shading – so homeowners don’t have to.
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