Period Townhouse Wallpapering

This job ran through the principal rooms of a London period townhouse: a grand reception room, bedrooms, and the hallway and landing that tie them together. The papers included a cherry blossom design, a gold damask and an illustrated paper.

Papers like these are unforgiving. A patterned or metallic paper shows every flaw in the wall beneath it and every imperfect join, and a damask repeat has to run true from the first drop or the error compounds across the room.

The finished reception room, bedroom and cornice details are below. Where a paper is this decorative, the measure of the work is that you notice the paper and not the joins.

Expensive paper on an unprepared wall is money wasted, and the failures are easy to spot once you know where to look.

Ask whether the walls will be lined. Lining is not an upsell. Under a patterned or metallic paper it is what stops every imperfection in the wall telegraphing through once light rakes across it.

Look along the seams in raking light. That is where joins show. On a quality job you should see the pattern and not where one drop meets the next.

Check the pattern against the cornice and skirting. In a period room nothing is square, so where the repeat lands against original joinery is a decision that has to be made before cutting, not discovered afterwards.

Ask about batch numbers. A shade difference between batches is invisible on the roll and obvious on the wall, which is why quantities are worked out from the repeat rather than from area alone.