In general, it costs more to wallpaper a room than to paint it, especially if professionally installed.
Beyond price, wallpaper is a commitment. It takes skill and experience to put up and is a chore to take down. Even those marketed as strippable tend to hang in there. This is another issue the industry is seeking to address.
“Our new Waverly 4 is so easy to remove that you just grab a corner and peel it off when you want to get rid of it,” says Kathy O’Brien, vice president of marketing for FSC, the wallpaper division of F. Schumacher & Co.
For the installation-challenged, there’s Paper Illusion from FSC’s Village line. “In-house, we describe it as ‘rip and stick.’ It’s a faux-finish design that you tear into pieces, dip into water and slap on the wall,” she says. “You don’t even have to measure or use scissors.”
Some of the new wallcoverings out there are tempting even designers who wouldn’t have considered using them before.
“I always avoided wallpaper because it seemed so artificial. The seams bothered me,” says Sophie Prevost of Cole-Prevost, a progressive design and architecture firm in Washington. “But some of the things at ICFF were very interesting. I really liked Tracy Kendall’s papers,” she says, noting one design resembling stuck-on Post-its and another adorned with large pastel sequins. “Seams wouldn’t matter.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com).
