National Wallpaper Week : Bringing the Outdoors in

As I posted earlier in the week, 05-11th October 2015 is National Wallpaper Week. In celebration of this, I have teamed up with Graham & Brown for my own home decoration project using one of their beautiful paste-the-wall wallpapers. I think I’ve admitted to you guys before, quite sheepishly, that although wallpaper is a real passion of mine, I’ve never actually used it in my own home since we’ve always rented, until we bought our flat two years ago. Whilst I absolutely adore bold papers that exude character, I’ve never actually been very adventurous when it comes to my own home, although I am working on this and I’m getting much more confident with every project we take on. So when Graham & Brown offered to provide the wallpaper so that we could transform a room in our home, I was really excited but also a little apprehensive. I knew straight away that our lounge could do with a bit of a lift. It was the first room we decorated when we moved in and I do love it. We painted two walls in Dulux Moss Blanket green and left two magnolia, an odd choice considering I hate magnolia, but our lounge only gets the sun early in the morning so I didn’t want to make it too dark in there. The green is a gorgeous colour though and makes me feel really calm and tranquil. I’ve grown up in Devon surrounded by nature and the same for my husband who is from Mazury in the Lake District region of Northern Poland so we both feel much better when we’re close to nature and greenery. The green helps with this and I have also incorporated plenty of wood and a few really hardy plants into the living room. However, we don’t have a lot of space for too many plants and I tend to kill them anyway as I’m definitely not green fingered. So when I got to thinking about what the room lacked or needed, a statement wallpaper was the perfect solution to give it that something special that it so desperately needed. I’d already seen a wonderful paper from the Glitterati collection designed by Julien McDonald and I knew that it was the perfect paper to pull the living room together.

The picture above is one of the magnolia walls in the lounge. We don’t have a dining room so we have this compact dining table that can be folded down when not in use and the chairs can be stored inside. It helps us to save space although admittedly we eat here three times a day so it is rarely ever collapsed like this. It was a really boring wall to look at and that serving hatch really is the central point of that wall and attracts all the attention. Friends have suggested we fill it in, but having a toddler and another baby due next month, it’s just so practical for us at the moment as we can be cooking or doing the washing in the kitchen and still keep an eye on kids in the living room. Plus the added benefit of being able to serve and clear food through it. But I did so wish that it wasn’t such an attention hog. The solution, I decided, was to cover the wall in the fabulous statement wallpaper that I’d fallen in love with and detract attention away from the hatch. Luckily, my husband also loved the Honolulu Palm Green wallpaper that I’d chosen so we wasted no time ordering it.

Once it had arrived, the next step was to get researching as we’d never done wallpapering before. After watching countless Youtube videos we were ready to get going. Being eight months pregnant it was up to my husband to do the honours. He started by preparing the wall surface. Once ready we got down to the papering, which, I have to say, was so much easier than I had imaged. The paste-the-wall’ paper uses a special backing paper that doesn’t expand when it gets wet. As you don’t need to soak the wallpaper, the paste can be applied directly to the wall which saves loads of time compared to regular wallpapers. Also, it meant that there was no need for a pasting table.

The first strip went up no problem at all and I was surprised at how quickly we made progress once we got into the swing of things. However, when we reached the hatch things did get a little more complicated. But my husband kept his cool and handled it like a pro, I was very proud of him!

The whole wall only took about three hours to complete and the process was surprisingly simple. In fact it left me wondering where or what else we could wallpaper. I considered doing the second magnolia wall in the lounge but I think it would be a little bit too much in such a small room so we’ll leave it at that. It looks absolutely fantastic and I couldn’t be happier with the way it turned out. I’m not exaggerating when I say it has really transformed our living room. It has provided that bold statement that we really needed to complete the look of the room. It was also the perfect way to bring more of a outdoors feel into the room without having to resort to more plants that I would inevitably kill before long.

The thing that I am most happy about is the way that it has really become the focal point of the room and in particular on that wall it totally detracts from the serving hatch. It’s hard to show in photographs, especially as mine aren’t much cop.

I also love the way that the really subtle glitter effect shows up when you get close to the paper and when the sun bounces off of it. It really is a lovely, pretty and quite elegant paper. You can kind of see the glitter in the image below but it doesn’t really do it justice.

So that was our little project in celebration of National Wallpaper Week. We thoroughly enjoyed doing it and we definitely enjoy looking at it everyday. I would like to thank the lovely folks over at Graham & Brown for asking us to take part in this wonderful project.

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Disclosure: This post has been written in partnership with Graham & Brown who provided the product for us to review. However, all the opinions in this review are our own and we stress that we only collaborate with brands and companies that we genuinely like and believe that our readers will like too.